Photonics Driving Economic Growth in Europe - Photonics21

52 Towards 2020 – Photonics driving economic growth in Europe
LED illumination at the
Bucerius Art Forum, Hamburg,
Germany. © OSRAM GmbH
The full refurbishment of a
medium sized European city
would provide compelling
evidence of the major
advantages that LED techno-
logy can bring to society.
(OLEDs). This requires close collaboration with the
micro-electronics industry to develop new system
architectures, including hardware and software
architectures and interfaces suited for lighting
systems, and in close relation with their (new) appli-
cations. Most of the existing ICT architectures are
built around the exchange of massive data streams
between a ‘limited’ number of nodes (typically, one
per office desk, one to two per home). For lighting
management, the number of nodes will be much
higher (30 light points per home, 100,000 light
points for an average community, with each light
points consisting of 50–1000 LEDs which may be
driven in even smaller subsets), while the data
rates needed per node are much lower. Lighting
management based on the existing architectures
will consequently come at a high cost, severely
hampering the market uptake of this technology
and applications. The markets served by lighting
are of a different nature, requiring different tradeoffs
between performance, functionality and cost.
Moreover, these architectures are likely to vary for
the different application domains: outdoor, office,
retail and residential homes.
It is clear that the opportunities for new, value added
lighting applications are massive, offering energy
savings, superior lighting control for contextdependent
lighting, improved quality of light, and
increased functionalities such as adaptive light-
ing. In particular, the effect of lighting on people’s
health and well-being also needs to be explored,
a dimension of lighting seen by industry to offer
added value far beyond its immediate energy saving
potential. Additionally, SSL could offer exciting
new opportunities in crop growth (green houses
and city farms), cattle breeding, and fish farming.
The major challenge in the LED domain however
is expediting the anticipated massive uptake of
intelligent lighting by the market. Whilst other
regions have placed their primary emphasis on
replacing existing light sources by LED retrofits,
the European lighting industry is convinced that
intelligent lighting offers greater commercial and
ecological benefits. Far greater energy savings can
be achieved by combining LED technology with
advanced controls, and can also generate significant
added value beyond energy saving alone. To
speed up its uptake, market demonstration and
validation will be essential, and at a level beyond
that of existing demonstration projects, which to
date have only covered a relatively limited number
of light points. The full refurbishment of a medium
sized European city would bring compelling
evidence of what LED technology can bring to
society, and would also showcase the commitment
of public authorities to energy efficiency. The vast
amount of information that could be gathered from
such an action would also act as a springboard for
driving the development of building- and districtlevel
energy regulations. Additionally, these large
scale demonstration actions also provide a research
opportunity, allowing issues related to scalability,
system latency, system security, and utilisation due
to user behaviour change to be addressed under
real life conditions.
The major hurdle facing public authorities considering
SSL deployment is the risk that their investments
will not yield the anticipated savings. The
intervention of the Structural and Cohesion Funds
would mitigate those risks for the early adopters,
and would be highly instrumental in overcoming