The move to replace legacy lighting with LEDs is one of the decade’s most important and well documented steps toward energy efficiency. The next innovation is upon us: Vendors are boosting the benefits of the LED themselves – and introducing new capabilities to the overall platforms — by adding intelligence.
Phillip Smallwood, the Director of Research for Pennwell’s LED and Lighting Group, said that despite the great deal of attention it has generated, LEDs represent only 6 percent of the worldwide installed base of lights. He sees the move to add intelligence as a part of the same ongoing and still nascent lighting revolution, not as a distinct new phase.
Smallwood likened the move from static to intelligent lighting to a less dramatic version of the coming of the iPhone. Before Apple’s innovation, people used their phones almost solely to communicate. The iPhone ushered in an era in which texts and conversations only are a part of many tasks that smartphones support.
