L.E.D.

by Bob Johnstone

  Our lips meeting soft and tender Love's all aglow

  Why shouldn't we surrender When lights are low?

  That same year, Lutron introduced its Capri dimmer, an exotic name for a humble appliance. The packaging depicted a shapely siren clad in a low-cut, sleeveless, slit-skirt, shocking-pink evening dress, one hand on hip, the other on the light switch. Print ads for the Capri emphasized the connection between dimming and dalliance. They featured two photographs of the same woman. On the left, under normal light, she was a hospitable housefrau proffering a cup of coffee; on the right, under low light, an aloof seductress dangling a come-hither cigarette holder. Subsequent advertisements were even more explicit. “Dial a romance,” cooed one, “in your living room, dining room, bed room.” Spira cannily packaged his dimmers in luxurious-looking boxes normally used for perfume. Instead of going the traditional lighting industry route of distributors and electrical contractors, he marketed his devices directly, via hands-on displays in department stores, to the end user — women looking to spice up their love lives. The ploy worked wonderfully well. Today the average US household musters more than forty light sockets, at least ten of them equipped with dimmers. Lutron is the world’s leading maker of lighting controls.

  In addition to promoting seduction, dimmers also offered another, somewhat more prosaic advantage. The more you dimmed the light, the less electricity it consumed. But in the mid sixties when Spira began telling customers that his devices were energy-savers, the initial response was, “That’s nice — but so what?” Following the oil shocks of the seventies, energy prices soared. People began to take lighting controls more seriously. Prior to the first energy crisis, occupants of non-residential buildings had had essentially no control over their lights. In an office block there would often be only one central switch for each floor. The first person to arrive in the morning would go to the panel board that mounted the switch and turn on all the lights. Rooms stayed lit throughout the day whether there was anyone in them or not.

  The implementation of lighting controls came about piecemeal, over many decades, and continues to this day. From the outset in the US it was driven by building codes, notably the California Energy Commission’s Title 24. The first iteration of this code dated back to 1978. It required simply that there be light switches in every room. Shortly afterwards, the code-makers added what was known as “A/B” switching, which gave occupants the ability to manually turn off a portion of the lights. In a typical installation, there would be two wall switches near the doorway: one would control half the (fluorescent) lights in the ceiling, the other the remaining half. The drawback of this system was that it relied on human factors to make the savings. But occupants were seldom instructed in its use. Anecdotal evidence indicated that most people simply turned on both switches. 1985 saw the introduction of automatic shutoff controls. Initially shutoff was done using a clock to switch off the lights at the set time, after everyone had gone home. Then Jerry Mix of WattStopper, a sensor specialist based in Santa Clara, California, convinced code-writers that motion sensors were a better way to accomplish the goal of turning off the lights when no-one was around.

  Dimming, by then common in homes, was obviously desirable. But unlike incandescents, fluorescents, which dominated non-residential lighting, were difficult - and expensive - to dim. (If their electrodes get too cool when power is reduced, fluorescent lamps simply conk out. In order to maintain the arc discharge, electronic ballasts must keep the electrodes hot.) A dimming ballast added anywhere from $65 to $125 to the cost of a fluorescent fixture. In practice what this meant was that controls were affordable only in high-status spaces like board rooms. Paying two or three thousand dollars to dim the lights in a classroom was out of the question for most schools. Title 24 set off a controls boom in other states looking to reduce energy consumption. Its recommendations were picked up by the Department of Energy and included in the energy policy acts of 2005 and 2007. Constructors grumbled, but the codes gave them little choice but to comply.

  Among the most enthusiastic proponents of lighting controls were researchers in the energy-efficient buildings program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This program, as we saw in Chapter Three, was set up by Art Rosenfeld in response to the first oil crisis. Its mission was to explore ways of reducing electricity usage. Switching from magnetic to electronic ballasts for fluorescent lights was one of its first initiatives. Another was daylight harvesting. This, it was estimated, could reduce a building’s lighting energy requirements by as much as forty percent. The basic idea was common sense. During the hours of daylight, when sunshine comes streaming through a building’s windows, artificial illumination is unnecessary. Accordingly, lights should be turned off.31 Utilities were keen on daylighting because it promised to reduce demand during peak periods. Leaving the lights on during the day was a tremendous waste of energy, costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The problem was putting the idea into practice. A seemingly obvious solution was to automate daylight harvesting using photocells, semiconductor-based sensors that could measure the prevailing illumination level in a room. Such sensors had long been applied to street lights, switching them on at sunset and off at sunrise. But street lighting is a simple system; office lighting is much more complex. Daylight is dynamic and unpredictable: it varies from hour to hour, even moment to moment. Tracking sunshine required lights that could be dimmed as well as switched on and off.

  The first sensor-based systems that could dim lights in response to daylight were clunky and unreliable. In attempting to follow the sun they tended to over-compensate, irritating workers toiling below. In 1984 a team of researchers at the Berkeley Lab developed a control algorithm that was more flexible. They were way ahead of their time. Electronic ballast technology was still in its infancy. By 1997 it had improved to the point where the researchers were at last able to try out their daylighting algorithm in an experimental lighting system installed on one floor of a large commercial office building in San Francisco. The results were mildly encouraging. In 1998 Title 24 introduced basic daylighting controls. This ruling was much influenced by a large-scale study conducted by Lisa Heschong, an architect based near Sacramento. Commissioned by Pacific Gas & Electric, the study found that students who took lessons in classrooms with more natural light scored as much as 25 percent higher than other students in the same school district. The finding overturned the conventional wisdom underlying school design which had argued that classroom windows should be eliminated, to prevent students from being distracted by external goings-on. Initially, the code required that in zones near windows or beneath skylights there be a separate manual switch to shut off the lights. Later, as the technology of photosensors improved, automatic daylighting controls became mandatory in new buildings.

  31 I well remember working at a large Japanese computer company just after the second oil crisis.During the lunch hour, to save energy, the office lights were all switched off. In 2001, following the chaos that accompanied the partial deregulation of the Californian electricity market, utilities renewed their interest in daylighting as they strove desperately to reduce electricity consumption in the face of rolling blackouts. Still, it remained hard to persuade building owners to retrofit daylighting controls. The systems seemed to create more problems than they solved. They were expensive to instal and hard to use. Specification was often inadequate. Calibration of the sensors to accurately reflect the effect of daylight variations on the light level was rarely done properly. Above all, it was unclear whether daylighting delivered the expected reduction in energy consumption. Putting real numbers on the savings was hard. The construction industry was understandably risk-averse: it was unwilling to invest in an unproven system. (Nobody wants to be a guinea-pig.) The lighting design community was remarkably passive in its approach to research. For their part, few manufacturers - with one or two honorable exceptions, like Finelite and WattStopper - were willing to take daylighting seriously.32

  “It’s
a challenge,” Francis Rubinstein, a senior researcher at Lawrence Berkeley, told me in 2011. “I’ve been been bending my pick at [daylighting] for thirty years, but it’s a tough, tough problem.” It was not that daylighting systems were rocket science, more that “you’re trying to design them so that a village idiot can make them work,” Rubinstein explained, adding, “and that is not easy.” Facility managers lacked the training to cope with complex lighting controls. “Here we are, taking this Maserati-type of technology, and assuming we can put it in in the same old way and it’s gonna work — it’s not gonna happen,” a frustrated Rubinstein concluded. After decades of effort, less than five percent of buildings in the US used daylight-following in even its simplest form.

  32 In 2011 Jerry Mix, the co-founder of Watt Stopper, would replace Terry Clark as CEO of Finelite. There was also another factor that slowed the uptake by industry of new technology developed by the elite scientists at Lawrence Berkeley. Perched on a hilltop far above the hurly-burly of the Bay Area, the lab was almost literally an ivory tower. One member of its lighting group became particularly frustrated by the failure of its findings to cross the chasm - “the Valley of Death” some called it - that separated lab bench from market place. A driven, highly creative individual, he was determined to make a difference. His name was Michael Siminovitch.

  With his tousled, longish hair and chiseled features Michael Siminovitch looked more like a rock star than an academic. He always dressed head-totoe in black. His students kidded him about this, but Siminovitch brushed them off, explaining that the habit began because he didn’t want to cause photometric errors in brightness measurements, then continued when he realized that it made buying clothes a lot easier. Siminovitch was born in Ottawa in 1954 into a family of scholars. His uncle Lou was a renowned molecular biologist who pioneered human genetics in Canada. For his undergraduate degree Michael attended Carleton, a small but wellregarded Canadian school. Realizing that the action in innovation was happening in the US, for his graduate studies he moved down to the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana. There Siminovitch met his first mentor. Bob Smith was a professor of lighting and illumination in the architecture school there; he also did work for the Department of Energy on early lighting standards. Many academics are content merely to publish papers that sit on the shelf gathering dust. Smith by contrast was constantly interacting with architects and engineers, asking them questions, listening carefully to their answers. In addition to his students Smith also taught contractors, people who were actually out there constructing buildings. Siminovitch was impressed by Smith’s ability to link the laboratory with the real world. “I got very interested in lighting and the idea that it was a place where one could be very effectual in terms of making change,” he said. “There was a lot to be done, it was a very rich area.” But where to begin? “If you really want to get serious about lighting efficiency,” his professor advised him, “you need to go out to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and sharpen pencils for a few years.”

  When Siminovitch arrived at the Berkeley Lab in 1983, one of the first people he met there was Art Rosenfeld. For a young man from a small Canadian school, mixing with intellectual giants like Rosenfeld and Sam Berman was exhilarating. Life at the lab was characterized by “lots of free thinking,” Siminovitch told me, “there were some really amazing minds there.” To begin with he felt himself an extremely small fish in a very large pond. Soon, however, Siminovitch began to thrive in this stimulating environment. Originally intending to stay only briefly, he ended up working as a staff scientist in the Lighting Systems Research Group at the Lab for the next two decades. But as the years passed Siminovitch began to rub up against the limitations of a national laboratory as a driver of rapid change. For one thing the time horizon for research at the lab was fifteen years, meaning that nothing ever happened quickly. For another industry was largely indifferent to the efforts of its scientists. “As long as these guys stay out of our way,” company folk would confide to Siminovitch over beers, “we don’t really give a flying hoot what they do.” The Berkeley Lab was producing fine work but it was not being picked up. What was needed, he realized, was a nimbler type of organization, one with better connections to the real world.

  In 1997, fate handed Siminovitch a golden opportunity to test his thinking. During the 1980s, fixture makers had introduced a new type of floor lamp called a halogen torchiere. Essentially poles with a inverted triangular glass bowl perched on top, torchieres produced high-quality illumination, most of it directed upwards. Portable and cheap the lamps soon became hugely popular, selling in the millions, especially to college students who needed lots of light to do homework in their dorms. These were often poorly lit as, seeking to save energy in the wake of the energy crises, university authorities had removed the overhead lighting. At Harvard, it was reckoned that around 90 percent of students owned a halogen torchiere. But for all their virtues the new lamps also suffered from two serious drawbacks. One was that halogen torchieres were energy hogs, sucking up 300 watts, the equivalent of half a dozen table lamps. They caused a huge upsurge in energy usage. Their owners didn’t care — after all, they didn’t have to pay for the extra electricity. But facility managers could tell when students returned to their dorms because the university utilities would peak out under the strain as thousands of torchieres were simultaneously turned on.

  The other drawback was that, in addition to lots of light, the torchieres also put out lots of heat. “They were essentially fire on a stick,” Siminovitch explained, and as such a hazard. At Yale one senior started a blaze attempting to dry a blouse on her lamp. She rushed the flaming garment to a nearby sink, locking herself out of her room, where her mattress had also caught fire. A faculty member got into similar trouble after hanging her hat on a torchiere. Drapes and curtains were frequently set alight by overturned lamps. Sprinklers could sometimes be relied on to put out the flames, but not everyone was so lucky. In 1997 the US Consumer Product Safety Commission reported that halogen torchieres were directly responsible for at least 189 fires and 11 deaths. Clearly something needed to be done. As universities began to ban the lamps, regulators came under pressure to step in. Industry turned to Siminovitch’s group at Lawrence Berkeley for help.

  His solution was to replace halogen bulbs with compact fluorescents. These would consume about a quarter as much energy and not overheat. Siminovitch quickly built a couple of prototypes to test his idea. They worked really well. Next, he sought the backing of the lab’s management, telling them that here was a chance to show leadership by addressing an important societal need. Having won grudging support from his bosses, Siminovitch approached GE. He asked the firm whether it could make a CFL that would fit a torchiere. The sceptical reply was, Sure — but who’s going to buy it? So Siminovitch went to Pacific Gas & Electric, the largest utility in northern California. He asked the power company whether it had any users who would be interested in a safer, more energy-efficient lamp? It turned out that Stanford University had been hunting for just such a replacement. Ultimately, what happened was that GE made the bulbs and PG&E developed an exchange program. Stanford students handed over their halogen torchieres and in return received a CFL-based replacement, free of charge. Other universities soon followed Stanford’s lead. The Berkeley Lab’s new lamp went on to win Popular Science magazine’s prestigious “Best of What’s New” award. Siminovitch was flown out east to accept the prize. In Washington he shook hands with a grateful Energy Secretary. His team subsequently switched its focus to concentrate on near-term problems. They formed partnerships with makers, end users, and utilities to demonstrate how technology could be applied to save energy. “We saw that when the industry, regulators, and end-use communities work together on a problem, we were able to effect massive change pretty quickly,” he said.

  In 2001, in the wake of California’s electricity crisis, Siminovitch joined up with WattStopper and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) to install a new energy-efficient l
ighting system in bathrooms at the DoubleTree Hotel in the state capital. Studies had shown that hotel guests tended to leave the bathroom lights on for an average of eight hours, effectively using them as night lights. Hotel managers were reluctant to instal standard occupancy sensors because of their potential to annoy guests by switching off lights too quickly. WattStopper came up with a sensor that would turn lights off after an hour. It also thoughtfully included an amber LED night-light that eliminated the need to leave bright overhead lights on in the wee small hours. The new sensor reduced the average energy usage of bathroom lights by a whopping 75 percent. Siminovitch followed up on this demonstration by testifying before the state legislature, helping to get the building code changed to mandate occupancy sensors. He also persuaded lighting manufacturers to support his proposal, instead of pushing back as they usually did. “This was a big success story for us,” Siminovitch said. It was a win-win: “everybody’s making more money and the state is saving more energy.”

  In 2004, Siminovitch got the chance to put into practice his vision of researchers collaborating with manufacturers. It sprang out of what he described as a “fairly contentious” meeting between regulators at the California Energy Commission and representatives of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA). California had been using its building code as a stick to oblige energy-efficient practice. Regulators were hounding lighting companies, demanding that they build ever more efficient equipment. But manufacturers chafed at being told what to make: they believed that they knew what was best for the public. “Industry has heart-burn with a lot of that process,” Siminovitch told me. “They like to amortize their tools over long periods of time and not have to respond to too much state regulatory change every year.” What the companies especially did not like was the Commission’s pushy attitude. At the same time, industry had no intention of abandoning one of the world’s most lucrative lighting markets. It was thus in the interest of the companies to improve their working relationship with the regulators. Two senior industry representatives whom Siminovitch had previously worked with came to him with a proposal. “We need to stop this arguing and try to figure out ways of mutual benefit here,” they said. “You have efficiency goals, we have lighting products which we think could evolve into systems you could use: why don’t we work together?” Simultaneously, state regulators approached Siminovitch. “Work with those people,” they told him, “put something together.”