Sparks Electrical News May 2019

LIGHTING

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HIGH MAST LIGHTING RETROFIT AT TYGERBERG HOSPITAL

T he high mast lighting of the Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town was re- cently upgraded and the high-pressure sodium installation replaced with LED floodlights. The result is significant energy savings and good colour rendering. Tygerberg Hospital is the largest hospital in the Western Cape and the second largest in South Africa. High masts are installed around the campus to provide general area lighting. These were fitted with 400 W HPS floodlights, which emit a yellow light due to poor colour rendering. As part of a cost saving drive, the Department of Health replaced the HPS floodlights with LED floodlights. An energy saving of 50% was achieved by replacing the 400 W HPS flood- lights with 216 W OMNIstar-midi floodlights. The OMNIstar-midi was the flood- light of choice because of its high colour rendering index, and its high local man- ufacturing content. The OMNIstar-midi is the smaller sized floodlight in BEKA Schréder’s OMNIstar family. The various optical solutions make it a versatile floodlight, ensuring the correct lighting for the area to be illuminated. It is a cost effective and efficient lighting solution to maximise energy and maintenance cost savings in high-power applications. In addition, because it has been locally designed and manufactured, it takes Africa’s harsh environments and conditions into account, thereby ensuring a long lifetime. BEKA Schréder locally develops and manufactures energy-efficient LED light- ing products, designed and suitable for local conditions. The company is proud to be associated with the Tygerberg Hospital and the Department of Health in providing a successful floodlighting solution for this project.

Enquiries: +27 (0)21 510 8900

WORRY ABOUT THE AMOUNT OF LIGHT AT NIGHT MORE THAN THE BLUE WAVELENGTHS

GE OFFICIALLY EXITS COMMERCIAL SMART LIGHTING

GE has closed the sale of its Current smart lighting division to New York City private equity firm American Industrial Part- ners (AIP), thus bringing to a close its once overarching at- tempt to sell and connect a broad array of energy-related products and services including solar panels, energy stor- age, electric vehicle charging, and onsite power generation through what it had launched as a 'billion-dollar startup.' The two companies declined to disclose the price of the transaction, agreed in principle last November. AIP will con- tinue to use the GE brand under a licensing agreement, as it sells products and services related to smart lighting. Those include luminaires as well as Internet of Things (IoT) schemes to collect and analyse data. But AIP will likely change the full name of the company, which is ‘Current, powered by GE’. “We will continue going to market as ‘Current, powered by GE’ for a transitional period, after which we will work with our new owners to rebrand the business name,” a Current spokesperson said. But the new owners look intent on con- tinuing to push Current into the IoT, where recent successes have included public outdoor lighting in San Diego. “Three and a half years ago, we formed Current as a new kind of startup within the walls of GE, and today we are thrilled to celebrate the successful conclusion of that jour- ney as we prepare to embrace our next,” said Current CEO Maryrose Sylvester. By June of last year, it had become clear that GE had stripped away many of the non-lighting aspects of Current, and had repurposed the group “to focus on the rapidly growing IoT lighting space,” a GE spokesperson said at the time. The lighting industry in general is banking on the IoT for its future. Many companies, not just GE, have found the transi- tion to be a rocky one. For example, Osram, the world’s sec- ond-largest lighting company, in March, issued its latest in a series of financial warnings over the past year. Such were the travails of selling new-fangled IoT lighting and energy ser- vices that, without really trumpeting it, Current had also kept a firm foothold in the market for traditional fluorescent lighting. In its present form, Current describes itself as “the digi- tal engine for intelligent environments.” It further explains that “the company blends advanced LED technology with networked sensors and software to make commercial build- ings, retail stores, industrial facilities, and cities more energy efficient and productive. Backed by a broad ecosystem of technology partners, Current is helping businesses and cities unlock hidden value and realise the potential of their environ- ments.” Current focuses on the commercial market. Another GE division, GE Lighting, still sells a line of smart colour and tuna- ble white bulbs for the home market called C. GE is, however, actively trying to sell GE Lighting, a move that would mark a complete exit from lighting.

A top lighting research group has reported that the amount of light at night – light levels plus duration – can potentially dis- turb sleep much more than can blue spectrum in the light. The findings marked the second time in a year that the group has downplayed the detrimental sleep effects of blue compared to other factors, such as brightness. The study of 16 adults by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Light- ing Research Center (LRC) might call into question the growing com- mercial trend of toning down blue frequencies at night, which is often part of vendors’ so-called ‘circadian lighting’ or ‘human-centric light- ing’ schemes. The study, published in March in the Journal of Biological Rhythms , looked at the extent to which different light conditions suppress me- latonin, a hormone associated with inducing sleep. Suppressing mela- tonin potentially disrupts sleep. In keeping with common wisdom, LRC had hypothesised that normal light with normal blue spectral power would suppress melatonin more than would light in which the LRC lowered the energy output of specific blue/cyan wavelengths between 475 and 495 nm — light known as ‘cyan gap.’ But that did not turn out to be the case, not even when the LRC ex- posed subjects to light for less than an hour. “Contrary to our model predictions, our results showed that short-term exposures to ‘cyan- gap’ light sources suppressed melatonin similarly to conventional light sources,” the researchers noted. Translation: The low-blue light suppressed just as much melatonin as did normal light with nor- mal blue spectral power. LRC had also hypothesised that light levels combined with duration — together known as the ‘amount’ of light — would also contribute to melatonin suppression. On that point, they were correct. “As hypothesised, there were significant main effects of light level

and exposure duration,” the study states. “But there was no significant main effect of spectrum. There were no significant interactions with spectrum.” Given blue’s growing villainous reputation in sleep, LEDs Magazine wanted to be sure that it was reading the scientific findings correctly, so it checked in with LRC director Mariana Figueiro, one of the four authors of the report. “Both amount and spectrum are important, but the impact of amount [of light] on melatonin suppression is greater than that of spectrum,” Figueiro told LEDs. “One cannot dissociate these two pa- rameters. Blue light does suppress melatonin, but the key finding is that it is not just about blue light. If enough energy is emitted at other parts of the spectrum, we will see a response because the circadian system uses all types of photoreceptors to respond to light for mela- tonin suppression.” The study comes about a year after LRC reached a similar conclu- sion in a study of Apple iPad users, in which it observed that gadget brightness was a primary factor in suppressing melatonin, but that the gadget’s colour settings were not. (In that case, the LRC used the term ‘brightness,’ which is a term that describes human perception of light. It is different from ‘levels,’ often measured in lux as in the LRC’s new study, although LEDs notes that it stands to reason that a higher lux level will be perceived as brighter). Nonetheless, lighting vendors are increasingly marketing products that strip out blue frequencies at night. In a recent example, the Crowne Plaza Atlanta Airport hotel has installed such lights in its guest rooms. Circadian disruption has been linked not only to poor sleep, but also to depression, metabolic and cardiovascular disease, and cancer in night shift workers.

Enquiries: www.lrc.rpi.edu

As reported by LEDs Magazine

SPARKS ELECTRICAL NEWS

MAY 2019