Alisa: Sustainable lighting – a dummies’ guide

On Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of attending my first Rushlight Built Environment Briefing. Given that Life Size Media has been a proud prize donor for the Rushlight Cleantech Awards two years in a row, the visit was long overdue.

And, I’m happy to say, worth the wait. I came away having learnt a fair amount about an area of our sector that I was previously pretty clueless on. Having spent quite a bit of time at industry events in the recent past, I can tell you that that’s not always been my experience.

So now that I am a little wiser, I thought I’d write up a quick overview of the event from my perspective, share some snippets that inspired me and offer anyone who might share my lack of knowledge in this area my brief ‘Dummies’ Guide’ to sustainable lighting.

To my surprise, the evening opened with a talk by Dr Stephen Cannon-Brookes on… daylight! It never occurred to me that daylight would be part of the programme. But of course it’s the ultimate energy efficient lighting and the only truly zero carbon solution. I was reminded that whilst technology clearly has a central role to play in the journey to a low-carbon future, we shouldn’t forget to look at what we already have available; what we’ve always had; and what we so often take for granted. Stephen suggested that poor use of daylight in modern design is indicative of the back-to-front thinking typical of contemporary life. And looking at the serenity created by the centuries old lighting design he showed in this photo (Merton College Oxford I think) I was inclined to agree with him, “we’ve thrown much of our experience away”.

The next speaker nicely demonstrated how technology can help us to make better use of this ultimate sustainable lighting solution.  Nagham Khan introduced us to the Monodraught Sunpipe, a natural daylight system that directs sunlight into a room from roof level. Lightpipes apparently date back to the Egyptians and were also used in Victorian hospital designs. Interesting stuff , but I found myself wondering how you balance between daylight engineering and artificial light in building design, given that you will always need the latter and, as the next speaker pointed out, “half the time it’s dark and the efficiency of carrots is not improving”.

Thus Gordon Routledge (Senior Partner at Ideas with Energy) led into his talk on LED lighting. And he shared some thought provoking facts along the way; 20% of electricity is used by lighting, the average home has 35 light bulbs and the average domestic electricity bill is £400 a year. Given the myriad applications for LEDs that Gordon outlined and the energy, cost and maintenance savings they offer you’d think this technology would be a no-brainer. But perhaps unsurprisingly the challenge is persuading businesses to take the long-term view and accept a return on investment that will take longer than a few years, no matter how significant or guaranteed that return might be.

But of course sustainable lighting solutions offer more than just straightforward economic and environmental benefits (although it seems these are considerable). I was particularly interested by the softer, subtler benefits described by the final speaker Mark Ridler, Lighting Director at BDP. Mark spoke very engagingly about design’s role in both energy efficiency and sustainability more broadly. He discussed the wealth of benefits intelligent and effective lighting design can bring, ranging from staff retention and productivity to customer attraction and crime reduction. Mark also left me with my personal favourite thought of the evening. Aesthetic quality is almost impossible to quantify but its impact on any business activity is profound; it’s part of what it means to be truly sustainable.