Partner Article

Shining a light on the future

Thomas Luecke, President and CEO of Technical Consumer Products (TCP) discusses the future of the lighting industry with a focus on the ever-growing LED market.

It’s been almost 135 years since Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. However, recent government regulation is gradually phasing out these lamps in favour of more energy-efficient lighting sources, shaking up the global lighting industry.

The need for energy-efficient lighting solutions comes from the increasing amount of energy used for lighting. In the UK alone, electricity consumption via domestic lights and appliances has nearly doubled since 1970, with UK households now spending around £1.9bn on electricity for lighting every year.

European initiatives are now well underway to increase the quality and efficiency of light lamps and from September 2016 legislation will result in only A or B class energy efficiency products being used, typically resulting in new technology such as Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) being the focus for the future of the lighting market.

LEDs have been a hot topic in the lighting industry and have been around for many years. As they originally only emitted a small amount of light, it has taken a long time to develop lighting effective enough to replace the incandescent lamp. This is however changing, at TCP we manufacture 40,000 LEDs every day with comparable output to that of an incandescent and are constantly developing new ways of making them more affordable for the consumer.

There is no doubt that LEDs are the future of the lighting market. According to McKinsey, LEDs are set to account for 41 per cent of the overall value of the lighting market by 2016 and 63 per cent by 2020, versus 12 per cent currently.

With energy costs an on-going concern for consumers and businesses-alike, we have seen an increasing demand for energy-efficient lighting at an affordable price. However, in addition to the innovative technologies that are being developed in the lighting industry, it is important that an emphasis is put on educating the public as there is still a long way to go when it comes to ensuring solutions are understood and more importantly implemented for long-term success.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Technical Consumer Products .