There have been no fundamental breakthroughs in traditional lighting technologies for about 40 years. Never the less, there have been significant incremental improvements increasing the efficiency of building lighting technologies by up to 50 percent. Even with these improvements, new scientific knowledge indicates that there is potential for additional improvements of up to 100 percent.

Recently solid state lighting technologies have made breakthroughs that allow light emitting diodes (LED) to create white light and have increased the efficiencies for cost-effective applications such as traffic lights. LED lighting applications for commercial and residential building use are just emerging. There is significant R&D required increasing the white LED efficiencies, performance characteristics, cost and practical lighting fixture development.

Specific issues that will be addressed in the Advanced Lighting Technologies Element are:

• Residential exterior porch lights as well as small commercial exterior building lights use incandescent lamps with very low efficacies ranging from 8 to 17 lumens per watt (lpw) and last only 800 to 1,000 hours.

• Market penetration of an LED-based task light into the general illumination market does not exist. A luminaire using this technology would represent the current state-of-the-art task light. Also, technological improvements in thermal management and LED device performance would have application to virtually all future LED luminaires.

• The majority of LED lighting uses are for signal lights, exit signs, automobiles and display panels. There are only a few specialized LED luminaries available in the market, yet there is a significant potential for building LED applications to save energy and money for California customers.