Americans report in surveys that they are likely to retire later than expected as a result of this economic downturn that doesn’t seem to want to quit. While that’s bad news for golf courses and Florida real estate, it helps one industry: energy efficient lighting.

We are squinting, rather than sprinting toward retirement these days. As part of the post-50 crowd, I very much appreciate good lighting in my work space, and I discovered that I am not alone in researching a recent report on lighting.

Why do we geezers need better lighting? A 60-year-old employee’s eyes receive only 40 percent as much light as a worker who is 30 to 40 years younger, according to a paper by Leviton. These older employees tend to dislike the one-size-fits-all lighting of most commercial buildings; in fact, find it stressful.

Lighting is best when tailored to the needs of the individual. This can be done by giving employees manual override of automated lighting, so that they can adjust brightness and color depending on what they are doing in their work station at any given moment. And of course that is one of the features touted by lighting control manufacturers – the ability of consumers to customize lighting preferences.

Why worry so much about worker comfort? Happy workers tend to stay in their jobs, and that saves employers money, says a white paper “Personal Control: Boosting Productivity, Energy Savings” by the Lighting Controls Association. New employees need about 13.5 months on the job to achieve maximum work performance. As a result, worker turnover costs a business about 1.2 to 2 times the salary allotted for the position. Research indicates that workplace design plays a significant role in employee satisfaction. And right now many people dislike the lighting, heat and acoustics of their workplace, even young folk.

Improving lighting doesn’t necessarily mean giving employees their own remotely control light bulbs – although it helps. The Light Right Consortium looked at six different lighting options in a typical office space in Albany, New York. Between 81 percent and 85 percent of employees said they were comfortable with a lighting design that provided direct/indirect lighting and wallwashing. By comparison, designs that provided light only from above received a ‘comfortable rating’ from only 69 to 71 percent of study participants. But the combination that the employees liked most included direct/indirect lighting, wallwashing and dimming controls that allowed workers to customize their lighting. This design won a ‘comfortable’ rating from 91 percent of employees.

Lighting is a booming industry. The use of LED lighting, alone, is expected to grow by 30 percent in 2011 and become a $1 billion market by 2014, according to a study, “Enterprise LED Lighting Research Report,” by Groom Energy and Greentech Media. The study targets the market for commercial and industrial LED lighting. Similar growth is occurring in the lighting controls market. Pike Research sees global revenue for lighting controls rising from $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion by 2016. Businesses, not households, are driving this growth.

Many factors account for the lighting industry’s enviable boom. But one, I think, is that it enjoys a feature most green energy products do not. Efficient and well-planned lighting provides immediate and concrete satisfaction. In contrast, I may really like the idea of my employer installing solar panels, but my senses won’t register a difference in the building’s electricity. In that regard, efficient lighting may be the “cell phone” of energy that the industry has sought for so many years – a product that can attract the mass market and turn conventional technology on its ear.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work appears in many of the industry’s top magazines and newsletters. She is publisher of the Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

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Last week, temperatures soared into the triple digits, reaching record highs for the Twin Cities. After a wicked winter, I actually welcomed the heat with open arms. That is, until the temperature inside my house hit a steamy 86 degrees – even with curtains closed and fans circulating. And while I pride myself on keeping an energy efficient – and comfortable – home, I was in a bit of a pickle.

With the fans not cutting it and no central air on which to rely, my only other option to beat the heat was a lone window air conditioning unit. I sat on my couch for several minutes, contemplating my (limited) options. Do I flip the switch and let the cool air rush in, or do I tough it out?

As sweat ran down my face in a steady stream, I caved. I also had to think of my three young kids – it was simply too hot not to do anything. And while the cool air felt good, all I could think about was how much my decision was going to cost me.

But is it odd to think that way? Can’t I just sit back and enjoy the comfort of the cooler air without worrying about the impact my air conditioner was having on my electric bill?

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

The Nielsen Company conducted a recent survey that found nearly half of residential electricity customers would be willing to pay for access to smart meter usage date, such as hourly energy usage and consumption data on individual appliances – e.g. an air conditioning unit.

Other survey findings revealed that 15 percent of the population would pay up to $10 a month for “smart meter” data, an indication of just how valuable consumers believe this kind of information can be.

I, for one, agree this information is a valuable asset. And while I’m not sure how much extra I’d be willing to pay for this kind of information, I do know I would put it to good use. In this instance, it may not have changed my decision to use my air conditioner. But at least I would be armed with the information for use in the future.

So tell me, would you pay for a “smart meter” service? If so, how often do you think you would use it?

Article by Tim Laughlin, appearing courtesy Xcel Energy Blog.

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It’s far from being a reality, but an Italian product designer has a vision for solar-powered laptops.

The Luce Solar Panel Powered PC is by Andrea Ponti would be powered by two solar cells, one behind the monitor and the other under a keyboard, writes Get Solar.

Ponti is an industrial designer whose research is focused on international projects between Italy and Japan; his design portfolio is nothing short of impressive (check out his amazing Sustainable Water Container).

Energy conversion and battery life are the key elements that need to be improved to make this product a commercial reality. But as the Get Solar article points out, there is a technology called electronic ink display that is very energy efficient and which could provide the answer for it.

For now, the closer you’ll get to a solar power experience at the laptop is sitting at a cafe on a sunny day with a cup of coffee. Luce, however, is definitely a snapshot of things to come.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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Just a few short decades ago, we couldn’t have imagined computers the size of a phone, GPS devices that can keep us from being lost, and internet technology that makes it possible to talk to a friend halfway across the world through your laptop.

It only makes sense that the technology currently revolutionizing the way we communicate will eventually be implemented in other areas of our lives.

Experts say these new technologies will make our home lives easier, more comfortable, safer, more energy efficient, and even more fun. The following infographic explores some of the potential technological possibilities we may see in our homes over the next decade.

Most of it seems pretty cool, but is it really that innovative or efficient? I want a house that takes away my ability to be inefficient by automatically monitoring and adjusting power usage without me having to do anything.

Article by Beth Buczynski, appearing courtesy Crisp Green.

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I have to agree with the Tea Party; the US government should not choose the light bulbs I use in my home. And fortunately, it does not.

Yet that’s the spin being pushed by those who want to roll back federal lighting performance standards. An odd mythology is developing around the standards.

Opponents claim that the standards amount to government picking and choosing winners and forcing them upon us. More specifically, they say that the feds have banned the incandescent light bulb, which has been around since Thomas Edison’s time.

This is not true; the incandescent light bulb is not being banned; the standards are agnostic about technology type as long as they perform as required. The 2007 law is meant to act as a market mechanism that encourages innovation. With a benchmark to work towards, scientists, engineers and product designers are working to displace older, inefficient devices. Already several different kind of light bulbs have made their way into the marketplace, including a new and better incandescent.

We have efficiency standards not only for light bulbs, but also for refrigerators, water heaters, air conditioners, microwaves and other appliances. They are nothing new. Those who see them as government intrusion may be surprised to find that the first US appliance standards were set under Ronald Reagan.

Still one might ask, do we really need appliance standards? Are they worth the bother? That’s a $300 billion question – the amount the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy estimates the US will save on electricity costs by 2030 through existing appliance and lighting standards.

Here are other important points about appliance standards made by Steven Nadel, ACEEE’s executive director, in a testimony on March 10 before the US Senate’s Energy and Natural Resource Committee. Nadel urged that Congress reject S. 395, the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (BULB), which would repeal lighting standards set in 2007 under the Bush administration.

• Appliance standards generated 340,000 net jobs in the U.S. in 2010.

• The majority of the standards are based on consensus agreements between manufacturers and energy efficiency advocates.

• Four types of bulbs already meet the standards, although the standards do not take effect until 2012. Two are incandescent bulbs.

• The 2007 lighting standards, alone, are expected to reduce annual electricity use by 72 billion kWh by 2020, enough to serve the annual electricity needs of 6.6 million average households and avoid construction of about 30 power plants.

• ACEEE forecasts that the lighting standards will reduce consumer energy bills by more than $7 billion by 2020, or about $50 per American household annually.

• A recent USA Today survey of 1,016 adults found that despite misinformation circulated about a light bulb ban, 61% of Americans favor the 2007 lighting standards, while 31% say they are bad.

Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work appears in many of the industry’s top magazines and newsletters. She is publisher of the Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

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According to a UK solar panel expert, silicon—the primary material in solar panel manufacturing today—may soon be a thing of the past. So what material has the versatility to take its place? You guessed it: plastic.

While there is a variety of reasons plastic trumps silicone, it comes down to three main points: flexibility, weight and cost. Not only is plastic much cheaper to produce, it can easily be rolled up and installed on a variety of surfaces.

Generally, commercial plastic acts as an insulator, the opposite of what solar panels are required to do. To change this, the molecular structure needs to be “tweaked” somewhat.

But according to experts, mass-producing this new kind of plastic is something that can happen in the near future.

In fact, Konarka, a U.S.-based tech company, is already using this plastic on everything from luggage to parasols, and San Francisco has outfitted local bus shelters with it.

The only problem now is making it as energy-efficient as silicon, which has an efficiency rating of 15-18%, while plastic is only at 7-8%.

If all goes as planned, this technology could be on the market in as soon as 5 to 10 years.

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Yesterday the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a pilot program to finance $25 million in home efficiency upgrade loans: Backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), these new FHA PowerSaver loans will offer homeowners up to $25,000 to make energy-efficient improvements of their choice, including the installation of insulation, duct sealing, doors and windows, HVAC systems, water heaters, solar panels, and geothermal systems.

Under the Pilot Program, HUD, through FHA-approved lenders, will insure loans for homeowners who are seeking to make energy improvements to their homes.

This pilot loan program is interesting in the wake of the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) controversy, wherein property tax-based financing of home efficiency improvements were rejected by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among others.  More information on the PACE controversy is available here.

A big issue with the PACE structure was that the PACE loans were superior in priority to the mortgages.

Will the FHA Powersaver loans be subordinated to the mortgages on the homes? The guidance does not say.

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As a self-proclaimed East Coast liberal intellectual who drinks Starbucks Grande Nonfat Decaf Lattes on a regular basis, I woke up this morning after the Mid-term elections of 2010 with a heavy heart.  I thought to myself, as I took public transportation to my office from my energy efficient townhouse in Center City Philadelphia, what will happen to environmental policy in this country? Now that the Republicans have the majority of the House, and spooked the pants off my latte-drinking brethren on the left, has the green revolution been quashed before it even really got started? Surely cap-and-trade is off the table, and incentives for renewable energy and green building will be scrapped or allowed to sunset without renewal under the guise of “balancing the budget.”

Reading the headlines did nothing to cheer me up. Politico calculated the cap-and-trade losses:

Nearly 30 (and counting) who cast ‘aye’ votes for Waxman-Markey were swept away on Tuesday’s anti-incumbent wave.

As I moped through my morning coffee, considering the appeal of starting a hedge fund or opening a high-end craft store (my secret dream), it slowly dawned on me that the mid-term elections had essentially changed nothing.  Even with majorities in the Senate, the House and the White House, cap-and-trade went nowhere.

Incentives are valuable for renewable energy projects and green buildings, but projects that depend entirely on incentives to pencil out are not sustainable in the long run.  The incentives would have to end eventually, and this way Democrats will not be forced to make the hard decision about when and how to do it.  They will not have to spend political capital and material resources on propping up or renewing stimulus incentives, but can instead devote their energy towards building the political climate which will embrace green.

Not that this helped my mood, but the world is still warming and there are still terrorists in the Middle East.   The green revolution may have suffered a setback in yesterday’s election, but the two essential underpinnings for the green revolution and moving to renewable energy have not changed.

Finally, perhaps this is a wake up call to recognize how hard the task of creating a green America really is.  The winds of politics are very changeable, and the American people have priorities other than the environment.  If Americans are not electing politicians who prioritize the environment, then the revolution has not come yet.  Moreover, if the success of the green revolution depends entirely on who is in power politically, it is not a revolution at all.  It is a pork project.  To have a revolution, the hearts and minds of the people (to borrow a phrase) have to be changed, one person at a time.  That process is slow, and subject to lots of setbacks.  Just ask Jimmy Carter.

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When solar energy companies think about how to reduce the cost of their product, typically a lot of time and money goes toward increasing the efficiency of solar panels and their manufacturing process. Reducing the production cost decreases the final cost the consumer will have to pay.

However, few solar companies start by making the building more energy-efficient, even though this effort can significantly drop consumer costs. Energy efficiency lowers the demand for energy in a building. If a building needs less energy, it requires fewer solar panels, which drives down the cost of the installation for the building owner.

But you may be wondering, how significant are the energy savings in a building after energy efficiency upgrades?

Buildings are large energy consumers, accounting for 40 percent of US energy consumption, according to the US Department of Energy. Homes make up 22 percent.

Not only are buildings big energy users, but they are also big energy wasters. In fact, 40% of the energy we use in buildings is wasted due to poor insulation and air leaks.

So the first thing to do is improve the building envelope. After that, it’s important to consider how solar energy will be used in the building and what kind of installation is most efficient. People tend toward solar photovoltaic panels because PV has become the image of solar energy, said Rick Reed, president of Solaray Corporation, at the Solar Power International conference in Los Angeles earlier this month.

But solar PV is typically only about 20 percent efficient, whereas solar thermal is about 90 percent efficient. “Many people are heating their water from solar PV instead of using solar hot water systems,” he said. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Solar thermal systems use much simpler, reliable technology and are much cheaper to install than PV systems. Still, they are largely an after-thought in the US.

For consumers, the cost of solar thermal and energy efficiency upgrades are typically much less than solar PV installations. However, most consumers interested in upgrading their homes to solar do not realize how much energy their houses could save before installing solar PV. And historically their solar installers have not told them either. Why would a solar PV installer want to promote energy efficiency if it would translate to selling fewer panels?

Thankfully, that’s changing, partly because new financing options focus on reducing the overall cost of solar for the consumer, rather than on simply selling them solar panels. As a result, more solar companies are beginning to move into the energy efficiency business. SolarCity is one example of a company that now combines energy efficiency services with solar installation.

This has huge implications. Retrofitting 40 percent of the residential and commercial building stock in the US would create over 625,000 full-time jobs over a decade, spark $500 billion in new investments, and generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for ratepayers, according to a September report by The Center for American Progress.

So if you have been scared away by daunting up-front costs of solar, now may be the perfect time to get a home energy audit and begin discussing solar financing options available in your area. You may be surprised what you find.

To read the full report by The Center for American Progress, Efficiency Works:Creating Good Jobs and New Markets Through Energy Efficiency, go to http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/08/pdf/good_jobs_new_markets.pdf

Article by Christopher Wold, Editor of the Energy Efficiency Markets newsletter

photo: kqedquest

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Altair Engineering (Altair) is a Michigan-based company that sells energy efficient solid state lighting products, particularly LED lamps, through its subsidiary, Ilumisys.

Altair owns U.S. Patent Nos. 7,049,761 (’761 Patent) and 7,510,299 (’299 Patent), both directed to a light tube for a fluorescent light fixure having a plurality of light emitting diodes within the bulb.

Light tube (20) is illuminated by LEDs (22) packaged inside the tube. The light tube (20) includes a cylindrically shaped bulb portion (24) having a pair of end caps (26, 28) at opposite ends of the bulb portion.

The LEDs are mounted on a circuit board (30). The circuit board (30) and LEDs (22) are enclosed by the bulb portion (24) and the end caps (26, 28).

The two patents are related in that the ‘299 Patent is a continuation of the ‘761 Patent, which means the patents have the same written description and figures but different claims.

Last month Altair sued LEDS America in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan alleging that the Florida-based LED maker’s LED-O T-8 Replacement Tube product infringes the ‘761 and ’299 Patents.

LEDS America launched the LED-O product line in July (see the LED-O brochure here).

The complaint (altair_complaint.pdf) provides a little bit of the backstory of the dispute, including a preview of one potential non-infringement argument.

According to the complaint, the defendant told Altair that its products do not infringe the asserted patents because they do not have an “end cap” as required by the claims of the patents, but instead have a “power supply.”

The complaint alleges that, prior to bringing the suit, Altair ordered one of the T-8 products and confirmed that the “power supply” is actually a large “end cap.”

Another point of interest relating to the infringement issue is that there is recent precedent as to the meaning of one of the terms of the ‘761 patent claims.

Last year another LED maker also targeted by Altair in the Eastern District of Michigan, LEDdynamics, won a partial summary judgment ruling that one of its LED tube replacement products did not infringe certain claims of the ‘761 Patent.

The ruling (altair_order.pdf) was based on the court’s claim construction interpreting the term “a plurality of closely-spaced light emitting diodes” to mean that adjacent LEDs are sufficiently close that another LED can’t fit in between them.

If the case gets to the claim construction phase, it will be interesting to see if the “closely-spaced” term and the prior interpretation of it plays a role.

Eric Lane is a patent attorney at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego and the author of Green Patent Blog Mr. Lane can be reached at elane@luce.com.

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