Cree LED Revolution Blog

Cree and LED lighting are starting a revolution

City of Asheville: Successfully Driving the Adoption of Street Lights in North Carolina

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Being a leader can be exhilarating. Take Cree, for example. We love leading the LED Lighting Revolution. You could even say we find it electrifying. So when we hear US cities, like Asheville, are implementing LED lighting, it pumps us up!

The City of Asheville has initiated North Carolina’s first large-scale deployment of LED street lights. This large-scale deployment, made possible through a grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, allows Asheville to take the necessary steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce its overall carbon footprint.

Street Lights in Asheville, North Carolina

In the initial phase of the project, completed in June 2011, 730 street lights were replaced with 67-watt to 195-watt LEDway® luminaires. An additional 2,913 LEDway® street lights are currently being installed, and the City anticipates saving 50 percent of current energy use and maintenance costs due to the LED upgrade.

“Upgrading to LED street lights allows us to decrease energy consumption, increase energy efficiency and contribute to the sustainability of our community,” said Maggie Ullman, energy coordinator for the Asheville Office of Sustainability. “This exciting initiative helps affirm Asheville’s role as a leader in carbon footprint reduction.”

Street Lights in Asheville, North Carolina

Here are just some of the benefits of the Asheville installation project:

  • By upgrading all HPS and mercury vapor street lights to LEDway® luminaires, the City anticipates a savings of approximately $260,000 per year from the combined energy and maintenance savings.
  • Phase one of the LEDway® luminaires installation reduces the City’s carbon footprint by an estimated one percent and saves approximately $45,000 in energy cost per year.

In addition to saving energy, this installation demonstrates how municipalities and local utilities can work together. “As more municipalities commit to replacing outdated, inefficient lighting with the support of their local utilities, LED adoption and consumer awareness continue to increase,” said Christopher Ruud, President of Ruud Lighting, a Cree Company. “We applaud the City of Asheville and Progress Energy for working together for the benefit of its citizens demonstrating the growing trend of cities and municipalities working together to join the LED lighting revolution.”

Is your city taking the necessary steps to install LED lighting? Tell us about it.

SLM IP66 Wins Building Operating Management Top Products Award

Friday, January 6th, 2012

Cree is proud to announce that it has been selected as a recipient of the Building Operating Management magazine’s Top Products awards. The Top Products Awards recognize the most popular manufacturers and suppliers of the year. The award was given to Cree for the SLM™ IP66 area luminaire featuring BetaLED® technology.

Building and facility executives participated in a national survey and chose the winners from 557 possible products, making this award a veritable popularity contest. Readers were asked to select their choices for Top Products awards that met the criteria of innovation and usefulness to facility managers. Based on reader votes, 73 products were selected as Top Products winners and the SLM IP66 area luminaire featuring BetaLED® technology was one of the winners. The SLM IP66 area luminaire will be featured in this month’s issue of Building Operating Management (BOM) as a Top Products Award Winner.

Building Operating Management Top Product Award 2012

Cree’s SLM IP66 area luminaire featuring BetaLED® technology has a distinctive, slim, low-profile design and offers architectural character for exterior applications. The combination of a unique modular design with light bar scalability and patented NanoOptic® technology contributes to exceptional lighting performance and reduced energy use.

This low-maintenance area luminaire significantly reduces energy consumption compared to traditional lighting technology and provides optimum target illumination performance—that means the light goes where you want it, and not where you don’t. The unique design of the SLM IP66 lends to maintaining lower operating temperatures that can contribute to the longevity of the luminaire and the light bar-based design means the light levels of the luminaire can be scaled for the specific application. The SLM IP66 luminaire is designed with the total systems approach, integrating best-in-class LED packages, driver technology, optics and style. Extended operating life and exceptional lumen maintenance are achieved in a range of environmental conditions.

We’re proud that the readers of BOM selected the SLM IP66 as a Top Product. Want more information? Check out http://www.betaled.com/us-en/TechnicalLibrary/TechnicalDocuments/BetaLED-SLM-IP66.aspx.

Which would you rather have in your back yard- HID, CFL or LED?

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Most people are familiar with the acronym NIMBY, or the phrase Not In My Back Yard. Usually it refers to something people feel they desperately need, but don’t want to live near.

NIMBY

It could be a major shopping center. Yes, it would be great to have your favorite retailers close to home rather than having to drive 15 miles to get to them. But you don’t want it within walking distance, because then you’d have to deal with the noise, the traffic and everything else that goes with it.

The same goes for landfills and power plants. You’re glad your favorite appliances have power and that your garbage has somewhere to go, but you don’t want the facility that generates the power or your garbage’s new home to be visible from your back door. Yet at some point, if we don’t change our ways, that’s exactly what could happen.

One way you can protect your personal back yard is by specifying LED lighting instead of High Intensity Discharge (HID) fixtures in any lighting projects. And the beauty is, making that move not only reduces waste and potential environmental hazards – it helps you save money. Here’s how.

Typical well maintained parking structures that operate 24 hours per day, 7 days a week with metal halide technology will be scheduled for group re-lamping approximately every 9 months. Which means a parking structure with 1,000 lamps will potentially add 1,000 lamps (bonus: which contain mercury!) to the waste stream every 9 months. Those lamps take up real estate, and as Will Rogers said, they’re not making any more of that.

So sooner or later, the disposal company has to build a new landfill – maybe next to you. If that’s not bad enough, as much as we’d like to believe that all lamps containing mercury ranging from the 1,000 HID lamps in our example above to the CFL lamps the neighbor down the street is using in their home will end up being properly recycled, sadly we know that this won’t always be the case. So as disturbing a sight that new landfill might be, what could be even more disturbing is the potential mercury that is being released from the improperly disposed lamps you can’t see.

Grandma Learns How to Clean Up a Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

Contrast this with an LED solution. LEDs contain no mercury. In addition, LED solutions can be designed to provide near maintenance-free service for more than a decade, even in our 24/7 parking structure example. Over a ten year period the owners of that 1,000 HID lamp parking structure will need to determine how to safely dispose of more than 12,000 lamps that a properly designed LED solution could avoid altogether. But there’s more to it than that. The materials used in BetaLED® luminaires are also RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) compliant, which means dangerous substances commonly used in electrical and electronics appliances are also avoided. In addition, BetaLED products are highly recyclable making it much less likely that they’ll see the landfill. Instead, they end up in other products – perhaps even in new LED luminaires. Ah, the circle of life.

Finally, we know LEDs can save significant energy consumption. But when coupled with adaptive control systems that can range from a simple occupancy sensor to a complex network based system, LED luminaires can save even more energy consumption. Let’s look at our parking garage again. There are probably large blocks of times when certain areas are vacant. Keeping the lights operating at a level that always assumes occupancy is just wasting energy and money. But with LED products that utilize adaptive controls you can significantly reduce energy consumption even further during periods of inactivity and instantly increase light levels as spaces become occupied. Not only does that reduce energy cost – it also can extend the longevity of an LED system as well.

The best way to make NIMBY work is to avoid the need in the first place. How could you use LED luminaires to keep your back yard landfill- and power plant-free?

5 Reasons why you should light your hotel, motel or restaurant with Cree LED Lighting

Monday, November 14th, 2011

Today’s guest blog post is by Mark Wanless, Cree’s national accounts sales director, who is holding down our booth this week at the International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show!

One of the easiest ways for hotels, motels and restaurants to cut their energy costs is to upgrade to energy-efficient LED lighting.

We’ll be at the International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show at the Javits Center in New York City Sunday through Tuesday talking about the benefits of LED lighting. But we know not everyone will have a chance to say hi to me, Jay, Jennifer at Cree booth #2676, so I’ve compiled some key things you need to know about Cree LED lighting.

1)      Cree LED Lights Can Cut Energy Costs. If your business is still shining incandescent downlights or Halogen track lighting, you’re just burning up money.  Most of the energy emitted from incandescent bulbs (yes, Halogen bulbs are considered an incandescent light source) is converted to heat instead of light. That’s why you’ll burn yourself if you try to touch a traditional light bulb.

When the Hampton Inn-Biltmore Square in Asheville, NC, replaced its incandescent and fluorescent lighting with approximately 680 Cree LR6 LED downlights, it saved more than 300,000 kilowatts, almost half of the original lighting output, according to an analysis of the hotel’s electric bills prior to and after the renovation.

HamptonHallway

2)      Cree LED Lights Are Designed for Really Long Lifetimes. What if you could go years without having to replace a burned out light in your lobby or dining room? Most of Cree’s LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours. That means you could leave them on 24 hours a day, seven days a week and they could last more than five years!  Plus Cree’s LED lights use less energy and can last even longer when they are dimmed!

At the Hilton Garden Inn Nashville/Smyrna (pictured below) a total of 134 65-watt incandescent lights in the lobby were replaced with 134 10.5-watt Cree CR6 LED downlights. Those LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours and feature a 5-year warranty, which means the hotel maintenance crew could go nearly six years without having to replace a light!

Hilton Garden Inn Nashville

3)      Cree LED Lights Are Dimmable. If you want to offer your guests mood lighting while they network over cocktails at the hotel bar or enjoy a romantic dinner in the restaurant dining room, dimming is key. Most of Cree’s LED lights, including our downlights and lamps, are dimmable to 5 percent. That means you can easily change the mood in a room depending on the time of day. Ever try to dim a CFL downlight? I bet it didn’t help improve the mood.

At the Courtyard by Marriott Louisville East (pictured below), hotel staff frequently dim the Cree LED lobby lighting in the evening, improving the night time atmosphere and saving even more energy.

Marriott Louisville2

4)      Cree LED Lights Can Cut Maintenance. Don’t believe all the light bulb jokes out there. Changing a light can be tricky if you’re running a motel or restaurant. Often you have to wait until there’s a lull in business to break out a ladder, or a lift, to change a bulb. We’ve heard stories of hotel bringing in a crew with a scissor lift in the wee hours of the morning, when lobby traffic was low, to change hard-to-reach bulbs. That’s too much trouble to have to go through on a regular basis, not to mention expensive. With long-lasting LED lights, you can cut back on lighting maintenance, freeing up your employees to focus on other more pressing tasks.

The maintenance and energy savings delivered by the Cree LED lights at several Denny’s restaurants in Colorado were so impressive that owner Pete LaBarre decided to install them outside the perimeter of the restaurants too.

Dennys4

5)      Cree LED Lighting is Beautiful. At Cree, we believe you shouldn’t have to choose between color quality and energy-efficient lighting. You deserve both. That’s why we invented Cree TrueWhite™ Technology, which is our patented approach to generating white light with LEDs. By mixing the light from red and unsaturated yellow LEDs, we’re able to create attractive, warm, white light that you’re used to getting with incandescent lighting.

The warm lighting is one of the reasons Denny’s Corporation chose Cree LED lights as the preferred lighting standard for all its new and remodeled stores across the United States, according to Mitch Riese, Denny’s corporate architect, senior manager of design & construction.

To learn more about LED lighting, you can contact a Cree LED lighting distributor in your area. Or if you’re going to be at the International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show, come meet us at booth #2676. You can even ask for me, I’m Mark!

ENERGY STAR program helps spread word about energy-efficient lighting

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Today’s guest blog post is by Timothy Henning, Cree’s ENERGY STAR program manager.

If you go shopping for lighting or appliances, it’s hard to miss the blue ENERGY STAR® logo that’s displayed on many of the most efficient products. By now, many people have come to know it as the symbol of energy efficiency. But ENERGY STAR is more than just a sticker recognizing energy efficiency, and Cree is pleased to be an active participant in the lighting program.

What is ENERGY STAR? 

The ENERGY STAR program is a joint effort between the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) focused on providing consumers with energy-efficient products that save money and protect the environment at the same time.

By using ENERGY STAR approved products, ENERGY STAR reports that Americans have saved nearly $18 billion on utility bills and avoided greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those from 33 million cars in 2010 alone! 

ES_CTW_GraphicFINAL9L_rgb

Partners Help Promote Efficiency

It takes a lot of effort to educate the world about the importance of choosing products that reduce energy consumption, so ENERGY STAR works with partners to help spread the word about energy-efficient products. This week, several Cree employees will be traveling to Charlotte, NC, in support of the 2011 ENERGY STAR Products Partner Meeting.

ENERGY STAR regularly hosts meetings for partners to gather to discuss new program initiatives, product specifications or other outreach activities. These meetings offer ENERGY STAR partners the opportunity to network with others to develop relationships and collaborations to promote ENERGY STAR. 

Cree Passed the Tests

While the ENERGY STAR program applies to a wide variety of products across a number of industries, Cree is an active participant of the lighting program. In order for Cree’s lamps and luminaires to earn the ENERGY STAR certification, our products must meet very strict photometric, electrical performance and regulatory requirements. 

Additionally, there are on-going program requirements and random product audits by the EPA to ensure the continued quality and integrity of the program.  To date, Cree has qualified 35 unique model numbers with more approvals anticipated before the end of the year! At Cree, we believe it’s important to meet ENERGY STAR’s requirements because it’s a key step toward getting good quality LED lighting in the market.

Simple Steps to Get Involved

Seeking out ENERGY STAR-qualified products isn’t the only way to help conserve energy. There are simple steps we can all take at home, work and in our communities to save energy, money and protect the environment. Currently, there’s a national campaign encouraging all Americans to take protect the climate.

Participating in the “Change the World, Start with ENERGY STAR” campaign is simple. Just take a moment to take a pledge to conserve energy by following some of the many steps outlined on the site.

And the next time you go shopping for energy-efficient LED lighting, be sure to look for the ENERGY STAR label.

Energy Awareness Month 2011 Blog Series Wrap-Up

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Energy Awareness Month isn’t a Hallmark celebration (yet) but for us energy-efficiency gurus, it’s a great excuse to shout from the rooftops the importance of conserving energy. This year we decided to celebrate with a month-long blog series focusing on the ways Cree’s products and employees are working to help improve energy-efficiency.  

But sometimes life gets in the way of Energy Awareness Month, which means you may have *gasp* missed some of our posts. Well, don’t despair. We’ve rounded up all of our posts from this month and summarized them in a nice, neat little package just for you.

Cree Energy Awareness Month

WEEK ONE

In our first week we highlighted some of the utility companies that are offering rebates for Cree’s energy-efficient LED lighting products, as well as the EcoSmart LED Downlight we make for Home Depot. We broke down the types of rebates utilities offer, and we showed off some of the best including programs in Illinois, Long Island and New Jersey.

REBATE

Oct. 4Utility Companies Offer Rebates for Cree LED Lighting

Oct. 5ComEd Offers Illinois Customers Major Rebates on Cree LED Lighting

Oct. 6LIPA Brings LED Lighting Rebates to Lucky Long Island Residents

Oct. 7Fist Pump! Rebate Gives New Jersey Residents Opportunity to Buy EcoSmart LED Downlight for $24.97

WEEK TWO

Typically this blog focuses on LEDs and LED lighting, but we couldn’t pass up the chance to teach you a little about another side of Cree’s business: Our energy-saving power products! We were honored to have Cree Co-founder John Palmour explain how silicon carbide-based diodes can make power supplies and electric motors more efficient. And we offered a great intro to our Silicon Carbide MOSFETs.  We also slipped a power post into week three because we’re wild like that (see below).

power plant

Oct. 12The Power to Do More: Cree Silicon Carbide-Based Diodes Improve Efficiency of Power Systems

Oct. 13Cree’s Silicon Carbide MOSFETs Help Improve Efficiency of Electronics

WEEK THREE

In week three, we primarily focused on Cree LED lighting, showing you a couple examples of ways our LED lights are saving energy in places you might not think of such as Kentucky’s State Capitol rotunda and gas stations throughout the country. We reiterated the importance of knowing the difference between lumens and watts when shopping for LED lighting. And we had to a leftover post from our Power week about solar panels that we couldn’t let you miss, so we slipped it in.

petrol1

Oct. 17Get Il-lumen-ated with Lighting Facts: Knowing the Difference Between Lumens and Watts

Oct. 18Making Solar Panels More Efficient with Silicon Carbide Schottky Diodes

Oct. 19Kentucky State Capitol Rotunda Shines with Cree LED Lighting

Oct. 20Energy-Savings Surprises at Gas Stations

Oct. 21Spotlight on One of Cree’s R&D Engineers

WEEK FOUR

In week four, we focused on Cree LED components, showing you a variety of special places you can find them (from a solar-powered car to the University of Michigan’s Big House). We also told you about our investigative applications engineers and how Cree EasyWhite technology can make it easier for you to design with LEDs. And, our senior director of components marketing did an outstanding job explaining why Cree is completely rethinking lighting.

Photo by Andreas Peña Doll

Photo by Andreas Peña Doll

Oct. 28Why We Push for Revolution, Not Evolution

Oct. 27Solar Race Takes Cree LEDs “Down Under”

Oct. 26Get Your Game Face on with Cree LEDs

Oct. 25Cree Applications Engineers Investigate LEDs

Oct. 24Bye Bye Binning, Hello EasyWhite: How Cree’s EasyWhite Technology Simplifies Designing with LEDs

We hope you learned something about our commitment to making products that help conserve energy. Now don’t leave without checking out our LED-lit pumpkin carving contest.

Cree’s Silicon Carbide MOSFETs help improve efficiency of electronics

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Cree is celebrating Energy Awareness Month with a series of blog posts about ways Cree and our products are helping save energy.

At Cree, we’re all about energy awareness and energy efficiency – from our LED components and fixtures to our power components. (Come on, haven’t you ever wondered how your iPod works? Or how electric vehicles drive with little to no gas?) That’s right, we take energy efficiency so seriously we even evaluate electrical processes – the micro level of electronics, if you will.

So what does this mean? It means our engineers continue to find ways to not only make LED lighting more energy-efficient, but also the power applications we rarely ever think about with products such as Silicon Carbide (SiC) Schottky diodes and MOSFETs.  No, a MOSFET isn’t a new type of spaces ship—it’s a metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor.

Cree Energy Awareness Month

Cree has been a recognized leader in SiC power devices for more than 20 years. In fact, we announced earlier this year the industry’s first commercially available SiC MOSFET.  This is a revolutionary breakthrough in power electronics and paves the way for significant energy conservation.   Just imagine reducing the weight of an electrical vehicle or an airplane by 25 percent!  That reduction in weight might get you all the way to the North Pole (depending on your current location, of course) without having to recharge.   Like a hummingbird -this is accomplished by the much higher switching frequency possible with SiC technology.    

But for non-power geeks, let’s think of it this way.

You’re ready for your morning training run or gym session – but not without some rockin’ tunes. You turn your iPod on and your music starts playing through your headphones – let the workout commence.

ipug

Flickr photo by NOGG3R5

But let’s pause for a second. What really happened between that moment you pressed play and the music coming to your ears? No, it wasn’t magic (although we certainly like to think so!). Deep inside that iPod is a transistor that converts the data from the song into sound, creating those sweet tunes you’re enjoying. There’s also the loss of power during this process, that’s why you’ll need to charge your iPod after your workout.

Seems pretty simple, right? Cree’s SiC MOSFETs operate in a similar manner, but on a much more complex scale for use in industrial high-power applications. We’ll leave it the power engineers to take it from there.

As Cree continues to develop SiC MOSFET devices, who knows what big steps we’ll take next. One thing that is for sure, we will never stop in our quest to drive energy-efficiency.

LIPA brings LED lighting rebates to Lucky Long Island residents

Thursday, October 6th, 2011

Cree is celebrating Energy Awareness Month with a series of blog posts about ways Cree and our products are helping save energy.

LIPA, the Long Island Power Authority, has been at the forefront of energy-efficiency for years. This forward-thinking, progressive utility, based in Uniondale, N.Y., has long promoted LED lighting technologies to customers and businesses in its service territory.  A non-profit municipal electric provider, LIPA provides electric service to more than 1.1.million customers in Nassau and Suffolk counties and the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, and it is the third largest municipal electric utility in the nation in terms of customers served.

LIPA currently offers a wide variety of incentives on ENERGY STAR® and DesignLights Consortium (DLC) qualified LED replacement bulbs and fixtures, through its Efficiency Long Island Program. Efficiency Long Island is a 10-year, customer-funded energy efficiency program started in January 2009. The program offers a wide array of rebates and initiatives to its customers for energy efficient products and /or projects.

Cree Energy Awareness Month

After all, the only thing better than an LED lamp or fixture is a less expensive LED lamp or fixture! And, what’s good for customers (reduced energy usage and reduced costs) is good for LIPA (potentially preventing the need to build more power plants).

Through the Efficiency Long Island program, LIPA is aiming for a peak electrical demand reduction of more than 500 Megawatts by 2018. For non-power-plant experts, that is the equivalent of deferring or eliminating one large or two medium-sized power plants on Long Island.

According to LIPA, “The Efficiency Long Island program is the most cost-effective resource option currently available to our customers. It is estimated that implementation of Efficiency Long Island will reduce CO2 emissions by about 12 million metric tons compared to the CO2 emissions that would be produced from new power plants burning natural gas. This is equivalent to removing 2.5 million cars from Long Island roads.”

LIPA-logo-2

A number of big retailers, including The Home Depot and Costco, as well as smaller area stores participate in LIPA’s LED Lighting program, providing discounts on popular lights used in commercial applications, including downlights and directional lights, like PAR-38 bulbs. LIPA also has an online store where residential customers can easily purchase lighting from leading LED manufacturers. A LIPA resident can purchase Cree’s best-selling CR6 downlight at a discount of more than 50 percent off typical retail price. Talk about incentive to change!

So we at Cree tip our hat to LIPA. It’s great to have progressive utilities as LED Revolutionaries with us. Onward!

June’s LED lighting contest winner can stop playing pool in the dark

Friday, September 2nd, 2011


Playing a game of pool by candle light might sound romantic, but it’s not very practical. I mean, what if the dim lighting causes you to sink the wrong ball into the pocket? The black 8-ball sure can look like the purple 4-ball in the dark.

Bad lighting shouldn’t get in the way of your game.

Unfortunately for Lori Pecchenino, bad lighting has been a staple of the family’s dining room-turned pool table room for 20 years. But that’s about to change thanks to the five Cree CR6 LED downlights Lori won in our June photo contest.

“We have just finished opening up our (past) dining room that we’ve converted to a pool table room and it hasn’t had any overhead lighting in there for 20 years,” Lori wrote me in an email after I told her she won. “We’ve always had to bring in table and floor lamps as well as having candles in there to get some sort of ambiance and lighting at the same time.”

We can’t wait to see how these lights will transform Lori’s new game room. Here’s the before picture that includes unfinished downlight openings just begging for some energy-efficient LED lighting.

pool room june2011 winner

Lori’s new Cree LED lights consume only 10.5 watts, but are designed to replace up to a 65W incandescent light. The CR6 LED downlights are designed to last 50,000 hours, which means Lori could leave her new lights on for eight hours a day, seven days a week and they could last more than 17 years.

And if Lori spends that much time in her pool room over the next 17 years, then she’s bound to be a pool shark, so look out if you come across her in any pool halls.

“We have not used LED lights before and are looking forward to them as our electrician said we’d be very happy with the evolution of the lights that are available today in LED,” Lori wrote.

We’re certain Lori is going to love her new CR6 LED downlights. If you want to get your hands on some, you can locate a distributor near you or enter our September LED lighting giveaway. And stay tuned for the announcement of our July and August winners.

Live Blog for President Obama’s Remarks at Cree

Friday, June 10th, 2011

*UPDATE* 1:09pm Our Internet coverage is spotty. If there are no updates on our live blog, bear with us as we try to get back online and share updates from this exciting event.
We will be live blogging President Obama’s remarks when he visits Cree on Monday. Make sure you don’t miss our coverage by signing up for an email reminder for the event. The event time has not been scheduled yet, but as soon as we have those updated details, we will update the live blog. For now, we just put the time down as noon, Monday, June 10. But that time will likely change, so don’t go changing your schedule yet.

Enter your email address below for a reminder on Monday!