by Shane Henson — August 30, 2013—According to a recent report from Navigant Research, revenues from light-emitting diode (LED) products, including lamps and luminaires, in commercial building markets will grow from $2.7 billion in 2013 to more than $25 billion in 2021.
While the company notes that the rise of LED technology will transform every part of the commercial lighting industry, this is not something that most building professionals would have expected a decade ago. When LEDs were first introduced in the mid-2000s for general space lighting, they were considered a disappointment, Navigant Research explains. Almost too dim to be useful, they were expensive and no more efficient than traditional fluorescent technology. Today, LED-based lighting products can successfully compete with rival technologies on the basis of light quality, efficiency, dimmability, and almost any other important metric except for price—which is falling rapidly.
The report, Energy Efficient Lighting for Commercial Markets, examines the worldwide market for energy-efficient lighting in commercial buildings, including LED, fluorescent, halogen, and high-intensity discharge lamps and luminaires. The report also details the market drivers for these technologies, including electricity costs, green building certifications, and improved controls, as well as the remaining barriers to adoption.
Per the report, in the coming years, LED prices are expected to fall to a point where savings from electricity consumption will provide a short payback period that will encourage consumer adoption en masse, according to the report. This shift will be most dramatic in the share of lamps sold for retrofit projects, where older lighting is often replaced specifically to improve efficiency. Although Navigant Research forecasts that only five percent of lamps sold to retrofit projects worldwide in 2013 will be LED-based, that share is expected to grow to 40 percent by 2017 and 63 percent by 2021.
