Tipping Point
With costs falling for LED chip and lamp manufacturers, LED lighting has reached a breakthrough point—for some applications. Residential consumers face two psychological thresholds, at $20 and $10, Dorsheimer says, and retail prices are already creeping down toward those barriers. He’s seen a Philips 60-watt-equivalent LED replacement lamp going for $14 with rebates at his local Home Depot store in New England, and Narendran says that replacement lamp prices could fall below $10 by the end of the year.
LED lighting can also be cost-competitive with conventional metal halide sources in some exterior accent applications, says lighting designer Jeff Gerwing, principal and director of operations for SmithGroupJJR in Detroit. And while there’s still often a price premium for LED downlights, some of them can compete with high-end compact fluorescent downlights, especially when maintenance and energy use are factored in. “There’s now legitimately an energy story where I can justify using an LED downlight,” he says. “That changes everything.”
Because they offer directional light, LED downlights can have a higher overall fixture efficacy than comparable compact fluorescent products, says Naomi Miller, senior lighting engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. For a downlight that offers quality dimmability, LED downlights may also even be cheaper than CFL, she says. “Plus,” she adds, “you’re getting better life, and in many cases you’re getting better color out of it.”
Competing with linear fluorescent lighting, however, is a different matter. “Linear fluorescent is still one heck of a cheap, reliable workhorse lamp,” Miller says. Linear fluorescent lamp manufacturers continue to improve the life of their products, with at least one manufacturer touting a product with a 60,000-hour life that rivals LED. Linear fluorescent lamps also offer energy performance similar to comparable LED lamps, and they’re often available for 20 to 50 percent of the price. For LED lighting to make inroads in the indoor commercial and institutional settings dominated by linear fluorescent fixtures, Davis says, “There has to be this combination of better performance coupled with lower price.”
Design Driven For lighting designers, though, the cost of LED fixtures is only one part of the equation. In the right application, LED lighting can provide functionality or aesthetic features that other energy-efficient lighting can’t match. A linear LED fixture can provide more punch to graze the texture of a wall than a fluorescent fixture, for instance, Gerwing says. “Am I going to pay a premium?” he asks. “Yes, but it also allows me to achieve something that I wouldn’t be able to achieve with a linear fluorescent source.”
“There’s now legitimately an energy story where I can justify using an LED downlight. That changes everything.”
—Jeff Gerwing, principal and director of operations for SmithGroupJJR
LED lighting also can provide more controllability and the dynamic experience that clients are looking for, says lighting designer Barbara Horton, president of Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design in New York. She recently completed a casino project, for instance, where all of the general ambient illumination for the first three floors and dynamic color changing in the coves is provided by LED sources. “We’re putting the ‘wow’ where we need to and spending the money where it’s important,” Horton says.
Of course, beyond just cost, a host of concerns remain about LED lighting, most regarding the unknown. Designers and manufacturers agree that the question of how to replace an LED source at the end of its life has not been adequately resolved. Designers are also concerned about finding manufacturers who can provide consistent products and testing data, as well as manufacturers who will stand by their products if something goes wrong.
In Horton’s opinion, intelligence and smart technology will play as much of a role as cost in driving the future of LED lighting. “Forget the shapes and the sizes and the things that we’ve had,” she says, “and start to think about it [LED lighting] in a more innovative way.”
