This piece was originally published in the March/April 2019 issue of electroindustry.

Craig DiLouie, LC, CLCP

Mr. DiLouie is Education Director for the Lighting Controls Association, a council of NEMA dedicated to educating the public about advanced lighting control.

According to a study by the DesignLights Consortium,¹ networked lighting controls can reduce energy consumption by an average of 47 percent. That makes control a powerful tool in managing energy costs, but it captures only a small fraction of its potential value in enhancing quality lighting with LED technology.

Quality lighting is a venerable concept in the lighting industry. It can be defined as lighting that satisfies owner and user requirements, often looking beyond light levels and watts to address visual comfort, space perception, color, and more. The industry accomplishes quality through design best practices and metrics, as well as quality products. Quality lighting can be challenging when the owner doesn’t understand its value, resulting in settling for less with a focus on initial cost.

The Role of Building Design

When evaluating the impact of building  design  on the bottom line, a useful rule of thumb is the 3/30/300 formula, with three being the average cost per square foot for utilities, 30 being real estate, and 300 being employee wages and benefits. We might add 3,000 to the formula for generated revenue.

Investing in new lighting typically focuses on the “3,” as the impact of saving wattage is not necessarily holistic to calculate and often delivers a predictable return on investment. However, independent of watts, the quality of lighting can affect the rest of the equation, with even a tiny impact delivering much greater economic value than energy savings alone.

That’s where networked lighting control comes in. The system consists of an intelligent network of individually addressable control points, which allow multiple control strategies to combine to maximize energy cost savings. If the system integrates with other building systems, cross-inputs can generate additional savings, such as occupancy sensors triggering the HVAC system. If the system is centralized, data can be fed to a server or the cloud for analysis by software. It is this connectivity and analytics that are the key to unlocking extraordinary new value in lighting quality, based on the adage that information is both power  and money.

Let’s look at lighting to start with:

• By controlling the light and color output of LED luminaires, the owner can implement recipes for promoting a more human-centric building environment, while mitigating glare and overlighting.
• By monitoring all lighting equipment, the system generates automatic notifications for maintenance response, which can make maintenance more efficient and enhance lighting quality by helping the owner ensure all lighting is
• By monitoring occupancy sensor status, the owner can better understand and manage space utilization, improve operational efficiencies such as cleaning, and gain insights valuable for future building designs.
• Through thermal mapping, the owner can work toward balancing HVAC loads, putting the right light and temperature where needed, and enhancing comfort.
• By monitoring light levels, the owner can anticipate end of life for LED luminaires and gain valuable insights into user light level preferences for future lighting designs.

These capabilities multiply when the networked lighting control system integrates with a building management system and the Internet of Things (IoT). The control system may have the wireless communication, bandwidth, intelligence, and software to deliver data from occupancy and daylight sensors  or other integrated sensors to other building systems and third-party software. By adding sensors using ubiquitous luminaires as the physical platform, the owner can geometrically increase available data and associated capabilities, such as inventory tracking and location-based services. For example, in a hospital, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags could be placed on wheelchairs and crash carts, with the RFID signal passed through luminaires, enabling hospital staff to locate equipment using apps.

Another example is business process improvement. Theoretically, any aspect of the building’s operating environment could be measured, from air quality  to water temperature to sound detection. Using a hypothetical water park, Acuity Brands’ Michael Skurla identified an example of how data can be used to improve business process efficiency. Based on data generated across the facility, the park’s facilities manager can check water consumption for the rides, temperature in the park’s restaurant, and  whether the lights are on. The manager can ensure there is appropriate staffing for the number of visitors. The lifeguard can determine how many people are in line. The accounting staff can calculate average length of stay per guest and match the number of people in the park to tickets sold. Visitors can find out how busy the park is, average water temperature, and average wait per ride. And the marketing department can calculate the fraction of visitors who take advantage of various attractions and amenities.

In short, all of this information can be used to determine and educate owners on user behavior and preferences, ensure building systems are delivering on these preferences, measure and benchmark the results, and inform future lighting and building designs. The result could impact environmental quality, user satisfaction, owner understanding of what users want, process efficiencies, and cost reduction. By generating evidence of user preferences and satisfying them, and then being able to measure the result, quality becomes more actionable as a business goal to increase user satisfaction and reduce costs. For lighting, networked connectivity and LED technology provide these tools while also providing installation points for additional sensors.

The IoT is young and still maturing, addressing issues such as interoperability, cybersecurity, and how to process a vast volume of data into actionable intelligence. Networked lighting controls, however, are further established and ready to deliver immediate benefits, including the potential for later IoT integration and the ability to better understand and deliver lighting quality.

1. “DLC Estimates Energy Savings from Networked Lighting Controls,” Lighting Controls Association, November 22, 2017, https://lightingcontrolsassociation.org/2017/11/22/dlc-estimates-energy-savings-from-networked-lighting-controls/