The lighting industry in India has undergone a sea change from conventional inefficient incandescent, halogen, fluorescent lamps to energy efficient and innovative LEDs due to the government’s thrust on energy conservation as well as rising consumer awareness for energy efficient products.
Lighting has come a long way and become more intelligent, opening up a whole new range of applications that have never been seen before such as Li-Fi (Light Fidelity) . Aided by the government programs such as UJALA and Street Lighting National Program (SLNP), there has been a rapid adoption of LED lighting across homes, industrial sectors, private offices, public buildings and monuments.
What’s new for 2020
Digitisation has scaled up the functioning of lighting beyond illumination. Internet of Things (IoT) in lighting has enabled the designer to produce fully integrated systems that can be connected seamlessly with a wireless network or Ethernet.
Smart, connected LED lights are bringing about a tectonic shift in the LED lighting market as lighting systems have become smarter with emergence of autonomous, self-commissioning illumination systems. The industry has witnessed a paradigm shift in LED lighting from analogue to digital systems allowing users to control, monitor and measure lighting output.
The digital capabilities of LEDs enable tremendous customisation in terms of light output and application and has also brought illumination and IoT together, allowing lighting systems to participate in the IoT. This has led to the emergence of connected lighting, marking a significant shift and transforming lighting from a commodity product to a fully integrated lighting system that can seamlessly connect with a wireless network or Ethernet, allowing users to remotely control and monitor their lighting systems. This has multiple applications in smart cities, buildings and homes, making lighting intelligent and personalised.
Taking note of this transformation in the lighting world, Rajesh Uttamchandani, Director, Syska Group declares, “Leading brands are paving the way with smart LED bulbs and switches that offer Wi-Fi connectivity and provide app, button and voice controls over brightness, warmth and colour of both individual and connected bulbs. The major technology behind smart connected homes is IoT and according to Strategy Analytics, IoT growth is higher than ever. However, annual growth will begin to tail off as the market normalises in the near future.”
“The lighting industry in India will continue to grow over the next decade, owing to increasing urbanisation, enhanced consumer awareness about LEDs and the growth of smart cities. We anticipate the demand for LED lighting to grow exponentially in the future,” anticipates Sumit Padmakar Joshi, Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Signify Innovations India.
‘Human-centric lighting’ is likely to dominate mainstream trend where LED lights can be tuned to positively help people, whether in terms of providing the optimum light setting to help someone concentrate, energise or relax.
The emergence of smart street lighting plays a significant role in the development of smart cities of the future. Upgradation of regular street lights to connected smart street lights, which can be remotely accessed, controlled and managed, thus optimising operations offers benefits like reduction in energy consumption by 50 per cent, minimising maintenance costs, lowering CO2 emissions and curbing light pollution. IoT in street lights ensures that street lights are automatically switched on once the sun sets and switched off after dawn. The system also sends alerts for each light that needs attention, to reduce failure and the need for sudden repair. Therefore, the avoided generational capacity can be ascertained from the reduced consumption of electricity.
Smart lighting is a catalyst for the smart home revolution. It not only provides ease of use with voice activation, but it can also create a sense of security and allow home owners to customise the overall feel of their home.
“With the government push for sustainable power sources and LED lights, both the power and lighting industry should witness a boom. Today, LEDs are the preferred choice of lighting option and are likely to become widespread, owing to their favourable features. Hopefully, India will become the first nation that uses LEDs for all its lighting needs,” avers Kishan Jain, Director, Goldmedal Electricals.
Potential Growth
LED lighting industry has been evolving with a lot of innovations happening in the sector. Currently, the demand for LED lighting in India is generated from metro cities due to stronger consumer awareness. Uttamchandani from Syska Group expects that in future, the demand is also expected to grow from Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, especially, in terms of street lighting and industrial lighting categories. Further, the expansion of the government initiatives will open up new markets for the LED lighting industry.
“Several government initiatives have put LED market in the spotlight and also LED has led to a stronger growth. Not only have the prices reduced drastically, but also broader acceptance among consumers. With growing awareness, there is also a massive growth opportunity for the next 5-10 years. The demand will be mostly dominated around outdoor lighting like streets and roads,” adds Uttamchandani.
The sector is expected to experience an upswing on account of infrastructure development projects such roads, smart cities mission. Realty market growth and innovations in street lighting will produce a surge in the sector. There will be a demand for more energy efficient and intelligent lighting in the future, as the world focuses on enhancing sustainability and conserving energy.
Due to burgeoning urbanisation, it is anticipated that close to 60 per cent of the world population will be living in cities. “In the home of 2030, lighting will be able to synchronise with everything from your doorbell to your television and music and will be fully adjustable to individual preferences. It will pre-empt your needs and complement your wellbeing, energise you, relax you and keep you safe. Our Philips Hue personal lighting range enables consumers to personalise their lighting experience using the Hue app on their smartphone. It can turn everyday lighting into an extraordinary experience. The system syncs seamlessly with music, movies and games, and transforms your room into an entertainment arena, bringing spatial awareness and immersiveness to a whole new level,” asserts Joshi from Signify Innovations India.
By 2030, it is expected that there will be close to 70 billion light points in the world. Public lighting is installed everywhere where people live, work, play and travel. Its primary function is to provide energy efficient, quality light to enhance public safety and enhance the urban landscape. However, in the future , a city’s lighting infrastructure will also offer enormous potential to be part of a city-wide network capable of acquiring data and delivering information and services to and from millions of devices, from garbage bins to autonomous vehicles. In this way, it could help enable smart city services to improve the lives of its citizens and city managers alike.
Connected LED streetlights provide highly energy efficient, quality light, but they can also act as sensor nodes on an information highway. In the future, connected streetlights could stream data between millions of devices. Connected lighting infrastructure will collect and distribute data and improve city services such as light, traffic, air quality, public safety, parking and other location-based services, leveraging state-of-the-art communication technologies. Autonomous vehicles will navigate roads safely, using and communicating with sensors in streetlights that scan the road and pavements, and provide a frame of reference by transmitting situational information to augment the vehicles’ on-board sensors.
Future Plans
The lighting sector is projected to experience buoyancy owing to development of infrastructure projects, 100 smart cities project etc. As a result, the LED lighting manufacturers have geared up themselves to cater to the rising demand of LEDs across the country.
Signify India has plans of expanding its reach of new LED innovations Philips T Beamer, Philips EYE PRO and Philips Smart WiFi LED Bulb. Signify has already installed 50 million connected light points worldwide and plans for every new LED product it produces to be connectable by 2020. This growing number of connected light points, sensors and devices, as well as systems, can collect large volumes of data for which Interact was designed to handle. The highly secure, scalable cloud-based Interact platform uses sophisticated and modern data management and data processing capabilities, including machine learning, to bring sense to all manner of data – creating data-enabled services for customers that will deliver benefits beyond illumination.
Sumit Joshi from Signify Innovations India claims that Signify is the first global lighting company to offer LiFi-enabled luminaires from their existing office lighting portfolio. Li-Fi is a technology in which high quality LED lighting provides a stable and fast broadband Internet connection through light waves. In the coming year, we will focus on new Li-Fi installations, trying to expand to new user applications. There is a lot of potential for Li-Fi in India, with millions of Internet devices being added into the connected ecosystem every day. Moreover, with more and more digital content being consumed, in the future, consumers will demand a faster Internet connection that can be enabled through Li-Fi.
He adds, “We also tied up with smart home assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa, to offer connected lighting to customers via voice command. By the end of the year, we expect to double our retail presence for smart lighting in the country with new Philips Smart Light Hubs opening across various cities.”
Kishan Jain from Goldmedal Electricals asserts, “Goldmedal Electricals has a dedicated research and development team that strives to create products that are not just usable, but also innovative and environment-friendly. The challenge is to create products that are suitable for Indian conditions and needs. That’s where Goldmedal has a distinct advantage. With opportunity comes responsibility, which is why at Goldmedal, we prioritise manufacturing quality and user-friendly products.”
