Different manufacturers and companies usually sell lighting systems as a set of components that are provided to create a complete lighting system. This requires a custom design and installation of the system. Thus, lighting systems are not integrated systems and this increases the cost and the complexity, and creates technical problems.

Designing and installing a lighting system, especially with dimming controls, is like building a car from parts verses buying a car. This non-integrated approach creates warranty and customer support problems. All too often the customer has problems and the various manufacturers point to one another and the customer is left without support to quickly fix the problems.

Additional problems include the complexity involved with properly commissioning and maintaining lighting systems and the changing needs of a lighting system for activities using a computer screen.

Specific issues addressed the Advanced Lighting Luminaires and Systems Element include the following:

• Hotel bathroom lights are often left on all night and are the largest lighting energy use in the hotel room. Many hotel/institutional bathroom lighting systems are inefficient and the rooms have no night-lights. Currently there are no systems to address this issue cost effectively that save energy, improve safety and lower overall operating costs.

• There are few, if any, integrated energy efficient high-end residential lamps available in California. The manufacturers and "Showroom" companies need technical guidance and support to create these high efficiency products.

• The typical California new or remodeled kitchen has six to eight incandescent downlights, which are very inefficient. Cost effective high efficiency CFL Downlight packages do not exist in the marketplace for retrofit or remodeling application.

• Portable task/ambient lighting luminaires with occupancy and other controls for office, home office, and commercial applications are currently not available.

• Integrated lighting systems designed for glare free lighting, occupancy, dimming and daylighting controls from one manufacturer with one overall warranty are not available in the California or US marketplace. An integrated system like this could reduce costs and increase lighting quality and would be ideal for California classrooms and many other applications.