Philips Lighting

Not so long ago, environmentalism was seen as a special interest of a few well-meaning and dedicated individuals, but it didn’t attract much attention in the mainstream. Today, it is front page news. Climate change is one of the most important issues we face as a global community, and energy consumption presents a major challenge. As politicians, businesses and individuals, we all have to take up our responsibility, and, at Philips, we lead by example.

Since our company was founded in 1891, our mission has been to improve the quality of people’s lives. For more than 30 years we have had programmes and policies in place to minimise the environmental impact of our products and processes.

Lighting accounts for 19% – or nearly one-fifth – of all electricity used in the world. As the world’s leading lighting supplier, we can have a big impact on energy efficiency and the resulting carbon dioxide emissions. Since we invented the energy saving compact fluorescent light bulb in 1980, we have continued to develop energy efficient lighting solutions that offer significant savings in energy, expense and CO2 emissions.

Two fundamental points are:

1. Three-quarters of all lighting currently installed uses older, less energy efficient technology, developed before the 1970s – a figure based on Philips analysis of sales figures and existing commercial and residential lighting installations; and,

2. During the last decade, there has been a revolution in lighting technology, especially in energy efficient solutions. These developments, well documented by trade media, cover all key areas of lighting such as light sources, control gear and luminaire optics as well as lighting control sensors and LEDs (light-emitting diodes).

Intelligent choices

If new efficient lighting technologies were adopted globally, the world could achieve an energy saving of 40%. This would save €106 billion in energy costs per year. This is equivalent to 555 million tons of CO2 emissions per year, along with 1.5 million barrels of oil and 530 medium-sized power plants.

Selling these lighting solutions is not only good for Philips, it’s also good for people and the planet. Perhaps most importantly, we are entering the age of individual responsibility. We need to change the way we’re behaving at an individual level. Businesses have a responsibility to help their customers behave more sustainably so we collectively tackle the energy and climate change challenge successfully.  

We have underlined this with asimpleswitch.com. Launched just before the Live Earth concerts in July 2007, this website is designed to start a global movement promoting easy ways to switch to low-power lighting, demonstrating that individual collective action can have a huge impact.

As the world leader in lighting, Philips is leading the industry in campaigning for a global move towards energy efficient lighting solutions. We are also working with nongovernmental organisations, energy suppliers, governments and retailers to accelerate the replacement of old technologies. People, whether acting personally or professionally, can make intelligent choices about their electricity use. Changing to more energy-efficient light bulbs or consumer appliances is one of the simplest measures every home, place of work, school or factory can take to make a contribution.

Lighting can make a positive environmental contribution in many ways. Adopting energy-efficient lighting can clearly help, but using innovative lighting techniques to beautify environments can also have a positive benefit on the spaces in which people live and work, contributing to their wellbeing and sense of safety and security.

Consider the numbers

The reality of the potential savings becomes more meaningful when viewed in the context in which lighting is used. In office or building lighting, for example, the difference in energy consumption between older and newer technologies can be between 30% and 70%. This includes the use of lighting controls, which turn the lights off automatically when nobody is present and adjust light levels in the office when natural daylight is present. These technologies are no longer the complex technical solutions they used to be. Today simple plug-and-play systems are available which save up to 70% of energy consumed. It is a sobering fact that globally less than 1% of all offices or schools use lighting controls of any sort.

A similar picture can be found in road and street lighting where cities and municipalities can make very significant savings. Old street lighting technologies date from technology developed in the 1960s. Today new solutions, such as the CosmoPolis system, offer energy savings of 50%, and a far higher quality of lighting. We can also control the light levels, making dimming and presence detection a reality, for even greater savings. The same kind of energy efficiency story can also be told for retail, industrial, and hotel lighting.

The rising energy prices make investments in renovation of existing lighting installations increasingly interesting from a financial perspective. For street lighting a complete system renewal (lamp; gear; luminaire) would have a pay-back of eight years at energy cost of € 0.10/kWh, whereas this improves significantly to only two and a half years for an electricity cost of € 0,16. When such an installation is equipped with controlled dimming, a similar improvement is seen from five to one and a half years.

As for home lighting, the ordinary household light bulb uses five times more energy than existing compact fluorescent alternatives, so the collective cost in terms of energy and costs is huge. In December 2006 Philips called for the replacement of incandescent light bulbs within ten years. And in 2007, there was, for the first time, a decline in the global demand of these incandescent lamps, which had been stable at around 10 billion pieces per year worldwide.

Solid state lighting is highly energy efficient, offering opportunities for major savings in for instance city beautification projects. LEDs, for example, are small, safe and very robust. More importantly, they can have lifetimes of up to 50,000 hours each, far more than other types of lamps.

Barriers and solutions

There is much more to come, especially as we work towards removing the incandescent light bulb that has been the mainstay of lighting for over 100 years. New technologies, like LEDs, compact fluorescents and energy-efficient automotive lighting, could reap energy-saving benefits of, on average, 40% and in some cases, 80% less consumption.

New legislation is needed to set minimum performance criteria for lighting. This should be supported by the development of tax incentives to encourage new technologies or discourage older, less efficient technologies. The development of new financing incentives; public-private partnerships and energy pricing initiatives offers the potential to remove one of the largest barriers – that of higher investment costs – and unlock the economic and ecological savings opportunity through energy efficient lighting.

Beyond lighting

Of course, we also focus on energy management in our Consumer Lifestyle products.

We have made several advances in addressing power consumption, for example by greater use of innovations like dimming backlights and ambient light sensors in our FlatTVs, or the application of LED lighting technology.

We are also very active in addressing the controversial issue of standby power. People wonder about those big TVs with little red standby lights that never turn off, yet they want this feature. So we found ways to minimise its environmental impact. Ten years ago that same red light used 8 or 9 watts of standby power. We’ve brought that down to 0.15 watts in the majority of the TVs we introduced in 2008. In fact, were you to leave one of the current Philips TVs on standby for a year, the electricity cost would be less than one Euro.

We are working to further strengthen the energy efficient and Green Product approach at both our Healthcare and Consumer Lifestyle sectors, leveraging our experience in Lighting.

Energy efficiency lies at the heart of our business. It’s one of the practical ways we deliver on our brand promise of “sense and simplicity”.

W: www.philips.com
W: www.asimpleswitch.com