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February 18, 2021
From neutralizing viruses to supporting data networking connected LED lighting offers benefits well beyond illumination
As LED lamps and luminaires have matured and their price fallen over the past few years, their long life, tunable color and low power consumption have kickstarted a major change in how we think about light inside buildings.
This goes beyond illumination into hygiene, health, wellbeing, data networking as well as using connected lighting systems as infrastructure for other Internet of things (IoT) sensors.
In the past, lighting accounted for a large proportion of commercial energy bills, with some estimates showing it at almost half of retail energy consumption. So, the regulations for light levels in buildings were set at a minimum – well below the light levels available outdoors – with an eye on energy use and with limited consideration for the needs of people, beyond being able to see their work.
With LEDs, the energy consumption is so much lower that there's now a good trigger to explore the various other aspects of lighting. Simply replacing existing lights with LED equivalents just to cut costs would be very limiting and a huge missed opportunity. Let's explore some of the other roles lighting can play.
The COVID-19 pandemic has really raised the profile of using UV-C lamps to neutralise viruses on surfaces, in water and in the air. The technology has been around for more than 30 years, being used to purify municipal drinking water, to help fight tuberculosis in some countries, and to keep air-conditioning systems and agricultural plants free of mould. But its adoption has been patchy.
There are many practical examples of how light affects us as humans. They include lamps for seasonal affective disorder (SAD), vitamin D supplements to offset lower levels of sunlight, blue-light filters on mobile phones and PCs, and citizens complaining about cool white streetlamp LEDs. Many scientific studies have highlighted how the quality and quantity of light we receive have an impact on our sleep patterns, our ability to work well, our memory, and how we feel.
With modern jobs and work practices, many people now spend the vast majority of their day indoors, with the US average at 87% in the early 1990s. So, it's clear that employees will work better, plus feel more awake and happier if their workplace is lit in a sympathetic way.
Lighting designers have got hold of the subject and, since the mid-2010s, the field of "circadian lighting" for buildings has become popular. Natural daylight changes in brightness and color temperature, so indoor light should mimic changes in the quantity and white color of outdoor light to respect peoples' circadian rhythms, which control the sleep-wake cycle. Suppliers are now going beyond circadian lighting into ‘biophilic design’, aiming to bring the fuller benefits of outdoor light indoors. They incorporate circadian lighting but also manage the pattern of emissions across the light spectrum to optimize light for cognitive function, mood, memory, and production of hormones such as serotonin, cortisol and melatonin.
There's a similar shift happening in horticulture. This is partly being led by start-ups running vertical farms, where crops grow in stacks of trays, each with their light recipe to control the spectrum and intensity, and their microclimate carefully controlled by a central system. But intelligent lighting systems are also available for regular greenhouses to mimic nature’s dusk or dawn and have plants start and close the day. Russian supermarket and farming chain Riat is doing pioneering work in partnership with Signify, growing salad plants in indoor farms all year around without natural light and without the use of pesticides. It has found crop yields for cucumbers and tomatoes are similar to those produced under traditional farming practices, but with much lower wastage, giving a payback period of about two years.
The world is at an early stage in the task of exploring these issues and there's plenty of learning still to come. New lighting systems being installed today need flexibility, programmability and control built into them so that they can be configured in line with what we know and can be updated later if the use of an area changes, or if science provides better answers than we have now. This means that modern lighting systems are now IoT systems with sophisticated controls.
Once the lighting is connected and controlled by an IoT platform, the economics of other IoT applications start to improve. It's attractive and relatively easy to use the lighting system as an infrastructure for other sensors to get data about things like occupancy, people movement and social distancing, levels of humidity, noise and light, as well as for connecting Bluetooth beacons.
With suitable luminaires in use, it costs less and is far easier to install these sensors to run over the lighting network, than to install a separate system with its own cabling. There's a parallel here with the option to use connected streetlights as a more general smart city infrastructure.
We're also starting to see the option of using lighting as a data network in its own right, with Light Fidelity, or LiFi. This modulates LEDs at high speed, so that people can't see any flicker, in order to send data to and from devices in the room using infrared or visible light. This is a younger technology: though not yet as universal as Wi-Fi is today, it offers interesting advantages in security, bandwidth, congestion, and in environments where radio-based communication is not allowed, or is difficult, such as in factories or oil and gas plants.
Finally, because of the history of lighting, many owners and managers of buildings and offices tend to think of lighting as a necessary overhead, but one that should be minimized. So light fittings, once installed, stay there for a long time and are only changed out during a refit or when they become faulty. However, advances in lighting technology show there's a strong argument for rethinking this approach, as there are now multiple business cases with attractive payback periods for upgrading earlier.
Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals, consumers and the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. In 2023, we had sales of EUR 6.7 billion, approximately 32,000 employees and a presence in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. We have been in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index since our IPO for seven consecutive years and have achieved the EcoVadis Platinum rating for four consecutive years, placing Signify in the top one percent of companies assessed. News from Signify can be found in the Newsroom, on X, LinkedIn and Instagram. Information for investors is located on the Investor Relations page.
