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The shift to LED lighting in the United States will progress rapidly over the next 15 years or so, and will cut energy consumption by 261 terawatt-hours in 2030, at which point LEDs will account for an estimated 84% of the lighting market, according to a study released this week by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) office. The research and analysis for the study, titled Energy Savings Forecast of Solid-State Lighting in General Illumination Applications, were done by Navigant Consulting, Chicago.
Long-range forecasts of market development are inherently a grain-of-salt tool for understanding the market’s direction, so it’s helpful that the DOE study is very open about where its numbers came from. The study includes detailed explanations of the models on which the analysts based their forecasts, plus sensitivity analysis that can help executives of lighting manufacturers and the agencies and distributors who handle the sales channel evaluate the study’s assumptions based on their own experience in the market. The DOE has even gone so far as to make a calculator available via its website where anyone interested can adjust the base assumptions and explore the results.
In the report, the DOE estimates that in 2013 lighting technologies were responsible for 17% of total U.S. electricity consumption, using approximately 609 terawatt-hours of site electricity, or about 6.9 quads of source energy. According to the authors’ model, LED lighting is projected to reduce lighting energy consumption by 15% in 2020 and 40% in 2030, which, in absolute terms, is 261 terawatt-hours or 3.0 quads saved in 2030.
The results of this forecast indicate that LED lighting sales (based on lumen-hours) will increase from approximately 3% in 2013 to about 48% in 2020, and 84% in 2030. The rapid growth of LED products between today and 2020 is largely due to LEDs’ costs reaching highly-competitive levels, combined with newly enacted efficiency standards, the report said.
“Much of this growth will occur first in the outdoor sector, with nearly the entire sector shifting to LEDs by 2025. This sector’s conventional outdoor lighting technologies have relatively high first costs and thus LED luminaires will rapidly become cost-competitive.”
In 2013 the installed base in lumen-hours was dominated by linear fluorescent and HID lighting, both of which have high operating hours, high lumen output per lamp, and large number of installations. However, in terms of installed base, LED lighting is predicted to account for a majority of installations by 2022 and 88% of all lumen-hours being produced for general illumination in 2030.
The report goes on to examine the lighting industry’s major submarkets in some detail, including indoor general illumination, decorative, directional, linear and low bay/high bay lighting, and outdoor street/roadway, parking and building exterior lighting.
Of the eight submarkets they looked at, the DOE’s lighting market model forecasts that LEDs will grow most rapidly in the street and roadway and general service submarkets in terms of the percentage of total lumen-hour sales. In the street and roadway submarket, LEDs are predicted to reach 83% market share of sales by 2020 and nearly 100% by 2030. The general service submarket will shift to LEDs a bit more slowly, with a projected 55% market share of sales in 2020, but will also almost entirely consist of LEDs by 2030.