STANDARDS | Market transformation and standards groups ally to evolve guidance for energy-efficient lighting products

Standards permeate almost every aspect of modern life — from allowable contaminant levels in drinking water, air emissions, and food to the safety and function of cars, appliances, and elevators. In business, standards provide a level playing field, a fair way to measure products that enables objective actions and decisions and boosts customer confidence that those products will work as expected.

In the field of commercial lighting, technical standards provide common language for measuring product performance, enable interoperability of various components and devices, and ensure minimum levels of product safety and durability. In the words of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, technical standards “quietly make the modern world tick and prevent technological problems that you might not realize could even happen.”

Despite the plethora of standards applied to commercial lighting, it isn’t always obvious how they are developed. To some, it might seem these rules and specifications are handed down unilaterally by standard-making bodies, but it’s just the opposite. Lighting standards are the result of meticulous study, discussion, and collaboration by disparate parties before being finalized by organizations such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), and others.

“The objectives for our standards are to keep up with current research and technologies and to include the broadest diversity of lighting community participation to reach consensus,” states the IES website, while ANSI notes that “In layman’s terms, you can think of a standard as an agreed-upon formula for the best way of doing something.”

To that end, standard-making bodies convene committees and working groups to provide input and steer the successful operation and transformation of the LED lighting market. DesignLights Consortium (DLC) staff have served on many of these committees, both past and present. We and fellow committee members from all sectors of the lighting world bring distinct perspectives and knowledge of the technical, business, human, and environmental issues that lighting standards must address. Together, we work to make sure the standards by which commercial lighting operates reflect proven best practices and are — as much as possible — products of consensus.

All collaborators benefit from the discussions that ultimately result in workable standards that move the industry forward. For the DLC, standards inform our Solid-State Lighting (SSL), Networked Lighting Controls (NLC), Horticultural, and LUNA technical requirements, as well as product evaluation for our Qualified Products Lists (QPLs). The DLC relies on standards to ensure that LED lighting has been reliably and consistently measured and can be evaluated against our requirements for listing. And, to the extent possible, we participate in development of any standards that reflect the DLC’s vision of a net-zero future where lighting, controls, and integrated building systems enable energy savings, decarbonization, and sustainability for all people and the environment.

Over the years, DLC staff have participated in the development of standards affecting all types of commercial lighting. Our earliest involvement included participation in the IES Testing Procedures Committee, as these testing standards were critical to developing the DLC’s first technical requirements over a decade ago.

The committee — which reviews and approves standard test and measurement procedures and calculations for illumination practices related to luminaire photometric, optical, physical, and electrical properties — currently benefits from the know-how of DLC senior technical operations manager Aaron Feldman. Aaron participates in several working groups, including one that recently obtained approval for a test method, ANSI/IES LM-98-24, to measure in-situ temperature of LED components, which the DLC may include in future iterations of its technical requirements.

Read on to learn more about some of the other standards we’re involved in.

General lighting/quality of light

A standards committee that has been especially useful in the development of DLC technical requirements is the IES Color Committee. As a member, DLC technical manager Kasey Holland provides input to the committee on gaps and industry needs that can be researched and built into future development of methods and metrics that describe and quantify color qualities of light. The DLC’s participation in this committee clarified issues regarding common lighting metrics that weren’t appropriate for LEDs, helping move the industry toward adoption of the TM-30 standard now incorporated into our SSL V5.1 Technical Requirements.

Horticultural lighting

A rapidly expanding segment of the industry, horticultural lighting needs standards that promote optimal energy use and crop production in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) facilities. Kasey, Aaron, and DLC senior lighting scientist Leora Radetsky served on the IES Horticultural Lighting Committee that developed a Recommended Practice (RP) for horticultural lighting, ANSI/IES RP-45. Released in 2021, it provides information necessary for lighting professionals to translate architectural lighting expertise into best practices for horticultural applications. The committee referenced one of the DLC’s earliest horticultural lighting resources (terms and definitions developed as educational material for growers before the RP’s release) to inform the development of the standard, which now includes references to the DLC’s Horticultural QPL.

Leora and Kasey are also voting members of the ES-310 – Agricultural Lighting Group of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), which coordinates all ASABE activities related to agricultural lighting systems and publishes several standards on topics such as units of electromagnetic radiation for plants (ANSI/ASABE S640) and methods for measuring and testing LED products for plant growth and development (ANSI/ASABE S642). The DLC references both standards in our Horticultural Lighting Technical Requirements.

Kasey also provides input to other relevant panels, including the Resource Innovation Institute’s CEA Accelerator Technical Advisory Council, which involves working groups that develop industry best practices guides for actively cooled horticultural lighting products, energy management, controls and automation in CEA facilities, and more.

Light pollution

Aligned with the DLC’s strong emphasis on abating light pollution, our staff are actively involved in developing and refining standards governing various aspects of artificial light at night. For example, Leora is contributing to an IES Technical Memorandum concerning metrics to predict Discomfort Glare in Outdoor Nighttime Environments, which, following evaluation, may be used in our QPL application process. She is also on two IES Outdoor Nighttime Environments (ONE) Committee working groups reviewing the BUG Rating system and refining lighting zones. As a voting member of the ONE Committee, Leora provides input on issues such as illumination calculations, outdoor lighting ordinances and bylaws, and other metrics.

The DLC’s efforts supporting appropriate outdoor illumination are informing another IES standards process — one that could yield positive outcomes for reducing sky glow and minimizing impacts on wildlife populations potentially harmed by luminaires with higher color temperatures (i.e., white light). Leora and Lighting Research Solutions founder Tony Esposito last year published a paper in the IES journal LEUKOS that identified gaps in standards for outdoor lighting — notably lack of standardized chromaticity boundaries, terminology, scientific nomenclature, and other aspects of non-white light (NWL). Although NWL is often better for wildlife and reducing skyglow, lack of standards has prevented the DLC from qualifying NWL fixtures for its LUNA QPL.

After the LEUKOS paper, the ANSI C78 committee convened two working groups to consider standards for NWL products. The DLC looks forward to revised and new standards that will allow us to accept a variety of NWL (amber and low-blue spectrum) LEDs into our LUNA and SSL QPLs.

In another area of outdoor lighting, DLC technical director Stuart Berjansky provides input to the ANSI C136 Committee focused on street and roadway lighting, paying particular attention to ensuring that standards allow for improved component integration and system interoperability. Aspects of this standard related to dimming control helped inform the DLC’s SSL Technical Requirements.

Lighting controls

The DLC views lighting controls as a top-tier strategy for decarbonizing the built environment, and we’re active in the development and revision of controls standards. DLC senior technical manager Levin Nock, technical manager Jason Jeunnette, and technical operations manager Bagwat Mohan serve on the ANSI C137 Lighting Systems Committee, which develops standards aimed at attributes such as human wellbeing, personal security, daylight integration, and energy consumption. Helping ANSI meet its mandate to retain a balance of stakeholders on the committee, Levin has successfully recruited several experts in energy-efficient NLCs to contribute expertise to the panel.

In addition, Jason chairs an ANSI C137 working group writing a new standard for NLC configuration reports designed to provide energy-efficiency programs with solid data to verify that incentivized NLC systems are set up properly. The DLC will eventually add this new standard to its NLC technical requirements and QPL.

The DLC also contributes expertise to the IES Lighting Control Systems Committee, where Jason and Levin provide input reflective of the DLC’s member utilities, to establish best practices in the selection, design, installation, commissioning, and operation of lighting control systems.

Other technical lighting standards

While nighttime illumination, horticultural lighting, and controls are hot topics in the world of commercial lighting and obvious ones for DLC involvement, we’re active in other essential standards as well. One example is senior technical analyst Adrian Martin’s work on development of a product category rule (PCR) for luminaires in North America as a member of the Luminaires PCR Committee of SmartEPD, an organization that creates digital tools related to product environmental impact data. Adrian also serves on the IES Computer Committee, where she helps develop standards for formats used to report test data.

In all this work, the DLC’s operational model, which creates bridges among manufacturers, designers, and incentive-granting energy-efficiency programs, puts us in a unique position vis-à-vis standards development. In some cases, we’re “power users” of new standards; in others, our regular interactions with a range of lighting stakeholders enables us to provide standard-making bodies with a valuable feedback loop when new standards and updates are considered.

With horticultural lighting, for example, the DLC brought to ASABE’s attention that liquid-cooled products weren’t typically testable and therefore couldn’t be listed on our Horticultural QPL. An ASABE sub-group then developed a testing pathway for liquid-cooled products. This has already helped enable the listing of these products, and we’re prepared to include the method in our technical requirements once it’s made public.

As stated previously, standards-making is a collaborative process. The DLC is one of many voices in many processes that are ongoing at any moment as new standards are developed and others tweaked to advance market transformation. Taichi Ohno, creator of the revolutionary Toyota Production System, once said that “Without standards, there can be no improvement.” At the DLC, we agree. Lighting and auto manufacturing are quite different fields, but the truth is universal: Improvement depends on methods that are documented, applied consistently, and universally understood by all stakeholders. Lighting standards provide that, and the DLC is honored to be part of the process.

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