The market is on a clear transition path from traditional lighting technologies to LED. The regulations across the globe have become more stringent fuelling the penetration of more energy efficient light sources.In this exclusive story we have tried to cover various aspects related to LED lighting and its future prospects in India including government’s stance and latest research and technological developments in the industry. The LED as a basic element can be classified as a light-emitting diode consists of a number of layered semiconductor materials. In the LED, electricity is directly converted into light particles, photons, leading to efficiency gains compared to other light sources where most of the electricity is converted to heat and only a small amount into light.
Piyush Goyal, the Minister for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy stated, “The government’s decision to switch over to LED bulbs by 2018 under the energy efficiency mission would result in saving of up to USD 6 billion per annum. When all the 71 crore conventional bulbs are replaced by LED bulbs it will result in a saving of 100 billion units of electricity.”
Market
India’s LED market is forecast to reach $1,457.8 million by 2019, at a CAGR of 35.9%, during 2014-19. Government initiatives to replace incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs, increasing energy demand supply gap, declining prices are the factors driving the growth of LED lighting in India. Street lighting application is accounting for majority of the market revenues in Indian LED lighting market. As projected, the turnover of Indian lighting industry by 2020 will be Rs 35,000 crore and LED will account Rs 21,600 crore on the back of government’s decision to switch to LED for all street lamps and public space lighting.
Government Incentives
The government too is trying to turn around the over-reliance on LED imports with policies to encourage both foreign and domestic manufacturers to establish LED fabs under the Modified Special Incentive Package Scheme (MSIPS) to provide cash grants of up to 20 per cent of the cost of project to companies that set up a semiconductor fab in India subject to a minimum initial investment of approximately US$ 50 million. Another incentive is the Preferred Market Access Policy of the Government of India, under which it provides 50 per cent of the tendered quantity of LED products procured by the government to companies that do at least 50 per cent value addition through manufacturing in India.
India LED Market to Grow 30% in the Next 5 Years
Declining LED prices coupled with favorable government initiatives to drive LED lighting market in India during 2015-20. The LED market is already growing at a robust pace over the last 2-3 years, the country offers huge growth potential, especially over the next 5-10 years. Increasing adoption of LED lighting is being witnessed across commercial and residential sectors, government projects, upcoming smart building projects, etc. The country’s LED lighting market is projected to register a growth of over 32% during 2015-20. Key factors that are expected to boost the market include declining LED prices coupled with favorable government initiatives to provide LED lights at subsidized cost and LED installation projects for streetlights. In addition, growing awareness among consumers on account of awareness programs by manufacturers and regulatory bodies is expected to play a vital role in shaping the country’s LED market over the next five years. “With manufacturing cost witnessing a decline every year and various government initiatives backing LED adoption, the LED lighting market in country is anticipated to grow robustly through 2020. Moreover, rising consumer awareness about cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness of LED lights would continue to drive volume sales from the residential and well as commercial sectors.
Key players
Considering the growing adoption of LED lighting, various major players are planning to set up their manufacturing units in India in future. Surya Roshni, Bajaj Electricals, Crompton Greaves, Osram, Havells, Wipro, Halonix, GE, Anchor, Indo Asian, HPL, Orient, Eveready, SYSKA, Oreva , Moser Baer, are few of the leading players operating in the India’s LED lighting market, however, various new entrants are expected in foray into the market in the coming years as well. Key Operations & Electro Components, MLS India, CDIL, Cosmos Led Lights, ERD Group, Legero, FIEM Industries are other leading players to name a few.
Application
Applications of LED are increasing day by day and thus are the quantities, and the above figures say it all. Shyam Sujan, Secretary General, Electric Lamp & Component Manufacturers’ Association of India (ELCOMA), calls the Indian lighting industry “proactive” in its outlook and in its endeavor to manufacture all lighting products within the country. The lighting industry in the country is dominated by organized players, who command an estimated 60–70 per cent of the market with a portfolio of high quality products and strong distribution channels.
Trends in lighting technology
There’s so much going on in lighting these days that we couldn’t fit it all into a standard list.
Connectivity: The next frontier in lighting is controls you may call it smart or connected. The challenge now is to make them more sophisticated, get them to communicate with other devices and make sure people use them. Energy saving is only the start of the potential benefits.
The internet of things: Lighting is an ideal network for internet-of-things services to be built on – because it’s already there in the ceiling of every building, looking down at us, wired up and ready to go. You only have to add a few sensors or cameras and some kind of data connection.
Built-in light sources – good idea: Manufacturers have got used to building LED light sources into fittings, rather than designing new luminaires around replaceable ‘lamps’. But what happens if they fail early? Or a better, more efficient module comes on the market? Organisations have sought to address the issue by coming up with agreed designs, but integrated modules are becoming the norm.
New power technologies: The latest innovation is power-over-Ethernet, which provides electricity through data cables.
Drivers are often the first component of a lighting system to fail, so some companies are taking them out of the equation – Iviti has a lamp with a DC LED chip that needs no driver at all, and Isotera sells a power system for lighting using a central hub, with each fitting connected directly to a bus cable.
Look, no wires: Everything’s going wireless these days, and lighting control is no exception. As well as radio-frequency-based systems, there are technologies such as power-line communication, which uses mains power lines to carry data to and from your fittings. And even for traditional wired control systems, it’s going to be more and more common for the user’s control device to be a tablet or phone that’s not wired to anything.
Healthier lighting: Light influences how productive we are at work, how well we learn and how quickly we recover from illness. The rise of LEDs means it’s gradually getting easier and cheaper for lighting manufacturers to put this knowledge into practice, and make products that promote health – usually by adjusting the brightness and colour of the light during the day to mimic natural light.
Revolutionary materials: Shuji Nakamura has moved from blue to violet LEDs. Violet LEDs put the gallium nitride on a base of some more gallium nitride rather than sapphire – ‘GaN-on-GaN’ in technical parlance. Not only do they render colours better, they also open up the possibility for longer lives and greater efficiency. Also set to revolutionise the world of LEDs is wonder material du jour grapheme.
The last few application areas fall to LED: In the past 12 months, manufacturers who had clung to old technologies such as metal halide and cold cathode have had to embrace LEDs.
The flight to quality: We’ve all seen examples of poor-quality LED retrofits that make a shop, café or office look dreadful, all for the sake of saving energy. But the Wild West of the LED market is being tamed, and even those who had their fingers burned in the early days are coming back wiser, with a renewed focus on quality.
Beyond light: Lighting isn’t just about light any more. It’s about data. Technologies such as Li-Fi and indoor positioning (that tracks people’s position using LED luminaires and their smartphones) are both based on visible light communication. It’s set to transform our shops, museums and indoor spaces, and to turn the industry on its head as lighting products are used for completely new purposes.
New LED Technologies emerging in 2016
John Cafferkey of Cambridge Nanotherm, predicts new applications such as lightbulbs which could be wireless hotspots and highlights the importance of thermal management in LED design. In LED lighting segment growth will be driven by the general lighting segment. This is a big change from a few years ago when growth was dominated by the back light TV segment. One interesting statistic is the rise of high power and super-high power LEDs. These are classed as super high power and are set to enjoy the biggest gains as a percentage of the market, especially in the lighting fixtures market. They are much simpler to work with compared to SMD packaged LEDs. Thermal management of LEDs is stepping up with the rise in high and super high power LEDs. Market analysts Yole predict that ceramics such as aluminium nitride will become increasingly prevalent in COB LED and high power packaged LEDs as power densities continue to increase.
One of the buzzwords to come out of the LED industry in 2015 was “human-centric”, it’s only possible with the control of wavelength and light quality that can be achieved by using LEDs. The use of different wavelengths of light to help balance children’s moods – warmer light when it’s quiet time and colder, bluer light when they need stimulating. This taps into our hardwired circadian rhythms and is one to watch for the coming year. The controlability of LEDs is relevant for car headlights. With LEDs it’s possible to form light in such a way that the road can be lit up as if with a full beam without dazzling oncoming traffic. Lighting is getting smarter with communication modules such as Bluetooth and ZigBee enabling smartphone-controllable lights as part of an IoT ecosystem. One very interesting technology that’s being developed is Li-Fi – delivering data using the visible spectrum rather than radio waves at speeds upwards of 1Gbit/s. This can be built into LED modules so lightbulbs could soon become wireless hotspots.
In thermal management there is a move by the aluminium nitride manufactures to create more cost effective (but thermally less efficient) material and there’re always incremental developments in MCPCB dielectrics. The rise in super high power COB LED devices and the high power packaged LED market is ramping up demand for ceramic substrates. The LED TV market is in decline – the market has hit saturation point and with new technologies such as OLED competing for the upgrade and replacement market it’s a shrinking pool. The same is true of screens and backlights for smart phones.
Chip Scale Packaging is really taking off. This approach (similar to a flip chip) removes the requirement for level 1 packaging. The CSP LEDs are simply mounted directly onto a PCB to make a COB device. Chip scale packaging ticks all the boxes of smaller form factor, better performance, improved reliability and, in theory, reduced cost. LED prices are expected continue to drop as manufacture transitions to Asia. LED manufacturers are looking to reduce cost by cutting the costs of packaging process with CSP and ultimately wafer level packaging. LED manufacturers are looking at increasing the volumes.
The lighting industry really wants to find a way of adding value to luminaires so they do more than simply produce light at the flick of a switch. This could be by dispensing with physical luminaires to make “light walls”, or adding technology functions such as circadian rhythm control or Li-Fi. At the moment there is no clear direction, but at some point, something will suddenly become fashionable and that will be the market driver.
Return of incandescent light bulbs more efficient than LEDs
Scientists in the US believe they have come up with a solution which could see a reprieve for incandescent bulbs. Researchers at MIT have shown that by surrounding the filament with a special crystal structure in the glass they can bounce back the energy which is usually lost in heat, while still allowing the light through. They refer to the technique as ‘recycling light’ because the energy which would usually escape into the air is redirected back to the filament where it can create new light. “It recycles the energy that would otherwise be wasted,” said Professor Marin Soljacic. Scientists believe that the new bulb could reach efficiency levels of 40 per cent. It shows colours far more naturally than modern energy-efficient bulbs. If the new bulbs live up to expectations they would cost under 50p a year to run and even improve health.
Transparent OLED Technology eliminates the need for Display Lighting
Crystal Display Systems has introduced a transparent display technology which is based on Transparent OLED (‘TOLED’ Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology that eliminates the need for display lighting.
Crystal Display Systems has introduced a transparent display technology which is based on Transparent OLED (‘TOLED’ Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology that eliminates the need for display lighting.
The TOLED displays are currently available in a 55-inch module and utilizes a self-emitting display that enables a crisp image while also offering a high transmittance rate of about 45%.
The self-emissive pixels contain 4 sub pixels, Red, Green and Blue for generating vibrant colours, and the final sub pixel (which would typically be black) is now clear to facilitate the transparency effect.
Poly-silicon TFTs act as the switching method for the Active Matrix of OLED generating a rich colour palette of more than one billion colours, with a 180 degree viewing angle in both vertical and horizontal planes.
Fireflies Inspire OLED Efficiency Gains
Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have replicated the patterns of a firefly’s light-emitting cuticle to create a bioinspired OLED that achieves a 60% increase in the light extraction efficiency and 15% wider angle of illumination. Many insects, birds, fish, and amphibians emit light as a way to communicate with each other, but the species that produces light most efficiently is the firefly.
“This work reports the first observation of hierarchical structures, i.e., inclined microstructures with nanostructures existing on the cuticular ultrastructures of a firefly’s lantern,” said Jeong. “Based on our large-scale photonic calculation, it was clearly revealed that the function of asymmetric and hierarchical structures substantially contributes to the efficient extraction and wide angular illumination of bioluminescent light that would otherwise be entrapped in the firefly lantern. The knowledge learned from firefly lanterns has been successfully utilized for next-generation OLEDs.”
Philips commits to make in India
Philips lighting has launched two innovative LED lighting products designed and developed in India based on consumer insights. The brand has unveiled the first ever color changing branded LED bulb with a single toggle of switch, Ace saver 2 in 1 and the slimmest ever down lighter, Razor LED. While Razor LED is the slimmest ever LED down lighter by Philips (7.8mm) it is 60% slimmer and 50% lighter compared to normal LED down lighters. The product has enhanced color rendering index adding to the interior appeal. On the other hand Ace Saver, an industry first is a 2 in 1 color changing LED lamp that changes color between crystal white and golden yellow in the absence of a mobile phone or a tablet.
Havells India eyes Rs 400 crore revenue
Riding on the new manufacturing facility for water heaters & LEDs, electrical goods maker Havells India expects nearly Rs 400 crore revenue from the segment by 2018. The Noida-based firm has invested Rs 100 crore to set up the plant which was part of the 40-acre Havells’ complex in Rajasthan State Industrial Development and Investment Corporation (RIICO) industrial zone. The $1.4 billion company has already established three manufacturing plants in the complex for making electric motors, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and light-emitting diode (LED) fixtures.
Surya Roshni
Surya Roshni Group’s width and depth across the lighting solution spectrum has enabled it to establish its presence across all corners of India. Surya Roshni is expecting to earn revenue of Rs 5000 million from its LED products in the next three years. The company’s prime focus is to educate and promote only sustainable energy efficiency and drive the LED.
NTL Lemnis India
The transition from traditional lighting towards LED has led NTL Lemnis India to invest into the development of technology centre, R&D and supply chain dynamics to create a constructive environment for setting the foundation of building LED lighting solutions that are class apart and technologically superior. The products manufactured in India have got the country a credible standing and worldwide acclaim. The company introduced Pharox, their new subsidiary in the world of LED lighting, completely manufactured in India. The firm is strong advocate of Made in India and has significantly invested resources to build LED lighting solutions that are focused on changing lifestyles.
Crompton Greaves
Crompton has won three prestigious orders from Energy Efficiency Services Ltd. (EESL), a joint venture set up by the Power Ministry comprising of four public sector undertakings – NTPC, PFC, REC and Power Grid, for the implementation of energy efficiency projects in the country. Crompton was the only player in the entire lighting industry to qualify for all three orders for energy efficient LED lamps from EESL, as per their technical and commercial requirements. Crompton will supply close to 4 million LED lamps to EESL for its different projects, the first of which was launched in Andhra Pradesh to distribute 7W LED lamps to consumers at an affordable price, followed by the project in Delhi. The move is part of the government`s plan to boost energy efficiency through widespread use of LED technology-based lighting solutions in the country.
Anchor Electricals opens LED lighting experience centre in Bangalore
Anchor Electricals inaugurated its second LED lighting experience centre in Bangalore, after Mumbai.
Spread over an area of 260 square meters, this is Anchor’s largest showroom and will offer customers ecologically-advanced solutions ranging from LED lighting to everyday electrical accessories such as wiring devices, wires and cables, switchgears, air-moving equipments, home automation, etc.
Anchor will also introduce an interesting range of 23 new models, along with the 40 models unveiled last year. The new product lineup in residential LED lighting comprises of large LED ceiling lights, compact LED ceiling lights, ceiling light with waterproof functions and pendant lights.
Orient Electric Bags ‘Make in India Awards for Excellence’
Orient Electric, part of the diversified Indian conglomerate CK Birla group, has bagged the prestigious ‘Make in India Awards for Excellence – 2015’ in the Consumer Electrical Products category. Rakesh Khanna, Chief Executive Officer at Orient Electric expressed his delight and cited, “It’s truly an honour to receive this award. At Orient Electric, we believe in ‘Make in India’ and understand the importance of indigenous manufacturing in economic development of the nation. We are amongst the very few who have started producing the LED range of lighting in India with standards comparable to the best in the international markets. Orient Electric Senior Vice President and Business Head, Lighting Puneet Dhawan informed that the firm is also gearing to meet the increased demand for LED lighting products and will switch more than 50 per cent of its production capacity from CFL to LED.
HPL sees brighter opportunity in LED business
Electrical equipment companies with technology, innovation, quality and cost-effectiveness as their core focus areas are going to play a major role here in India. One of those companies is HPL, which currently stands tall as THE TECHNOLOGY BRAND OF INDIA. HPL will continue to create more value for its customers and focus on consolidating its dominant position in India, while expanding its reach globally,” says Lalit Seth, MD, HPL.
Moser Baer targets Rs 500-cr market size in 3 years
With an eye on tapping the burgeoning LED market, tech-manufacturing firm Moser Baer plans to enhance its product portfolio and develop a strong distribution network, as it expects the Centre’s smart city program to give a major boost to the demand for such devices in future. Moser Baer expects to have up to 7 per cent market share in the next three years. “We expect to have a market of Rs 500 crore by FY 2018-19 with 6-7 per cent market share. This year it will be in the sub-Rs 100 crore category but is growing rapidly. We will have Rs. 1,000 crore-plus market in the next five to six years,”said Moser Baer CEO Shiv Nath.
FIEM Industries
The objective of FIEM industries to make the Indian Lighting industry a leader in energy efficient lighting and environmental consciousness by reducing the share of national energy consumption for lighting from 18% to 13% may not prove to be a difficult task considering consumer demand for energy efficient lighting products to enable energy consumption for lighting to reduce from 18% to 13% of total power consumption. Develop strong domestic manufacturing capability for LED lighting products and Luminaires to reduce dependence on imports and become an export hub for ASEAN and Gulf countries.
Kwality Photonics
Kwality Photonics, India’s largest producer of LEDs, foresees a huge potential in LEDs industry. Vijay Kumar Gupta, Managing Director, opined that’ “Our R&D centre is manned with 10-15 professionals who consistently work on new inventions. We normally invest 5-6% of our revenue as R&D expenditure. The capacity utilization is currently 80% and we have 3 lines in Hyderabad which makes100 million LEDs per annum. As of now we export our automotive LEDs only to Middle-East and our exports comprise 10% of the production volume.” Kwality has signed MoU with Telangana to manufacture 100 million LEDs per day.
