An efficient lightbulb shines against a dark background.

As Lighting Program Manager for EERE’s Building Technologies Office, Jim Brodrick leads Energy Department activities to advance solid-state lighting (SSL) technologies that will reshape the lighting industry. This month, he kicked off a research and development (R&D) workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina, that brought together experts and stakeholders from across the country to discuss SSL trends that will inform future efforts. Working with designers, manufacturers and stakeholders nationwide, Brodrick is helping pave the way for light emitting diode (LED) technologies that will reap huge U.S. energy and carbon savings and transform the way people live and work. He shares what’s ahead in an interview with Amped Up!

SSL lighting can be found in homes and businesses across the nation yet the technology is still in its infancy. Where are things today?

You will find LED-based products in many places but as far as all the sockets in the United States, or luminaires in the ceiling or out in the streetlights – it’s only 3% penetration. So that’s extremely small and there’s a lot more to happen. What’s going to drive progress is that the LED-based products will become more efficient and they will cost less.

The Energy Department is working to solve difficult riddles in crystallography and this will open the door to a new level of performance. There’s a difficulty now in getting the structure of the crystal just right… so our programs are looking into this atom by atom, layer by layer. Today, the best commercial LED package is about 50 lumens per watt and the program seeks 250lm/W. That’s quite a jump and will allow the technology to move into more homes and buildings.

Also, SSL is at a point in time where the delivery of lighting services may change greatly. There’s LiFi [a wireless optical networking technology that uses LEDs for data transmission] and using lighting as a platform for sensors. Each streetlight could have a camera so you will know if there’s a traffic jam downtown. This is all coming and how it plays out is not certain. This is a large business opportunity.

What energy savings have been realized through SSL technologies and what is untapped?

Some 230 cost-shared projects funded to date have resulted in millions of SSL products that are currently installed that are based on R&D funded by the Energy Department. Those products yielded about $2.8 billion in U.S. energy savings over the past 15 years. By 2030, SSL could potentially reduce national lighting electricity use by nearly half – the annual equivalent to saving 3,000 trillion Btu worth $26 billion in today’s dollars.

What does 2016 hold for Energy Department SSL investments?

An SSL funding opportunity worth about $10 million is planned for release in the May/June timeframe for advanced R&D on LED and organic light emitting diode (OLED) technologies. Goals of this effort are to maximize the energy efficiency of SSL products in the market; remove market barriers through lifetime, color quality, and lighting system performance improvements; reduce costs of SSL sources and luminaires; improve product consistency, and boost domestic U.S. manufacturing within SSL industry.

Amped Up! Magazine is the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s publication that highlights breaking technologies and achievements in renewable power, energy efficiency and sustainable transportation that influence global change toward a clean energy economy.