Commercial Industrial Lighting Market…

Environmental & Economic Research and Development Program Commercial Industrial Lighting Market Characterization

About the Research Project

Commercial and Industrial (C&I) lighting has traditionally comprised a significant portion of energy efficiency savings portfolios. Energy-efficient solid-state lighting is saturating lighting markets, diminishing opportunities to generate energy savings that have typically resulted from replacing legacy lighting systems with LEDs. However, solid-state technology also enables sophisticated controls, new applications, and higher efficacy products. This study brought together program administrators (PAs) from the U.S. and Canada to jointly explore the commercial ambient linear and high/low-bay market to:

Quantify the remaining commercial legacy lighting stock still available for LED replacement through 2030 and characterize the nature of this market.
Assess the viability and potential savings of next-generation (NextGen) opportunities for LED products beyond legacy fluorescent to LED conversions.

Contributor: DNV
Project Timeline: January 2024 - December 2024

Research Objectives:

Identify a strategy for fully converting commercial and industrial research participants to LEDs.
Define a set of next generation commercial lighting energy efficient measures that electric utilities can pursue.
Determine if the opportunities assessed are ready for market success and to determine what barriers still exist to market expansion including a review of the supply chains to deliver product and provide market support, the nature of product competition including proprietary solutions, and the performance (relevant lab and field applications) of new solutions, energy efficiency baselines and savings and value propositions/customer satisfaction.
Characterize market potential as a percentage of total market on a national basis relevant to each customer segment.
Gather all project stakeholders together to review the results of all the activities and brainstorm solutions together to develop possible program design changes and offerings.

FF ES FOE Commercial Lighting Side Image01

Research Project Highlights

Key Findings

While there are some jurisdictional differences, the C&I lighting market has largely reached the “late majority stage” where LEDs currently represent 60% of linear fixtures in the field and 75% of sales on average. As a result, there is a broad consensus that the majority of linear ambient and high/low bay fixtures in the field are LEDs and that the size of the legacy market will continue to decline. Further, the remaining market with legacy technologies—about 40%—is chiefly located in smaller buildings or limited subsectors with fewer staff and economic resources and/or in harder-to-serve communities. Additionally, while there are viable opportunities for replacing existing LED installations with higher-efficacy products or adding controls, these opportunities do not have the same energy savings potential as legacy conversion measures and will come at a higher cost. PAs will no longer be able to rely on lighting to provide low-cost, high-volume savings and instead will need to transition lighting program designs and approaches to access these higher costs but viable savings while still capturing the remaining viable saving.

Next Steps and Recommendations

The research identified two recommendations:

Maximize the quality, efficacy, and functionality of LEDs for customers that are looking to install LEDs.
Target hard-to-reach segments of the market and other market laggards.

Learn More

Project Reports:
LightingPlus Market Characterization

Questions?

Contact the Future Focus team at futurefocus@focusonenergy.com