In a guest post for the Lighting Controls Association (LCA), lighting designer Jim Benya offers a dose of sanity around the lighting and controls industry’s ongoing emphasis on energy savings at a time when LED lighting, lighting controls and the latest generation of building energy codes have driven the energy consumption of lighting systems down to very low levels. He likewise challenges the current focus on analytics to manage lighting loads, which increasingly amount to “micromanaging milliwatts.”
“The usual prognosticators of IoT and lighting rely heavily on touting the energy savings that big data and analytics will bring. With lighting energy use asymptotically approaching practical minimums, this is rather silly (at least for lighting),” Benya says.
He points out that with practical lighting power densities at 0.35 w/sf, 10% power savings is a “whopping” 0.035 w/sf, only 350 watts over 10,000 sf of a typical building. In such a setting, assuming initial cost for networking and analytics of about $1/sq ft, payback for that savings will take 80 years and a 50% improvement will shorten that to just 40 year.
“In most buildings this proposition will not survive value engineering or in most cases, the laugh test,” he says.
Instead he suggests moving the conversation to plug-and-play standards for lighting system components amid a shift to widespread use of DC-powered lighting, with analytics integrated into whole-building energy management systems.
Benya’s full discussion is well worth the read and some serious thought: Lighting Controls in the Time of Low Lighting Power
