Opportunities in Smart Lighting

Published: January 26, 2012    Category: Electronics and Devices

The “smart lighting” concept means different things to different people, but distilling its essence, what seems to be intended is lighting with an additional layer of intelligence that provides enhanced functionality; creating opportunities over and above the simple provision of light where it is needed:

• Smart lighting systems today, generally consist of sensors located at light fixtures, which are networked back to a central controller. They distinguish themselves in the marketplace by the nature of the sensor, how the networking is provided and the degree to which they provide management information.

• For the immediate future, smart lighting opportunities are strongly focused on improving energy efficiency, but NanoMarkets believes that the addressable markets for smart lighting will expand to include environments where the benefits being sold will include improved aesthetics, comfort and even improved health.

Some Embarrassing Questions for Smart Lighting Vendors

All of the above hints that a lot of money is going to be made in the smart lighting space and NanoMarkets believes that this will ultimately be the case.  Nonetheless, NanoMarkets notes that manufacturers of smart lighting systems must—as part of their business case—answer some questions about what is new and different about their systems:

• Although presented as something new under the sun, smart lighting is clearly related to the residential and commercial building automation systems that have been touted by various firms since the oil crisis of the 1970s.  These systems cannot be said to have been abject failures; they are certainly used in commercial and industrial buildings to some extent.  But building automation is not the huge industry it was supposed to be.  And for one reason or another, building automation systems have not often been used to control lighting systems.  They are more likely to control HVAC.  This raises the issue of whether there is now enough incentive for automated lighting systems to be widely used and what that incentive is.  What does today’s smart lighting systems have that the old building automation systems lacked.

• One can also see something of the smart lighting system concept in the simple sensor that switches on and off lights in rooms.  These are especially common in rest rooms in relatively low occupancy buildings where these rest rooms are not used all the frequently. These systems are clearly useful, but can hardly be considered an opportunity.  There do not seem to be large addressable markets for this kind of simple sensor plus light system that remain untapped.  But given that, does the market need a more complex system, such as implied by the smart lighting concept?

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