By Tom Pincince, President and CEO, Digital Lumens

While Massachusetts is known for software, storage, networking and a number of other technology concentrations, it doesn’t get much attention or respect for lighting – outside the lighting industry. So, I would like to take a moment to outline what is going on in lighting and how it will contribute to local, national and international energy efficiency objectives.

Massachusetts Undersecretary for Policy in the Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Dave Cash, presented the ‘Massachusetts Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2020’ at a Progressive Business Leaders Network event on Tuesday, Feb. 15 – “A Vision for a Clean and Competitive Commonwealth”. His presentation was a deep dive into how he expects to reduce the Massachusetts energy footprint by a whopping 25 percent using a portfolio of policies – all while creating jobs in the ever-expanding clean energy economy.

Whether you are interested in buildings, transportation, electricity supply or other strategies, what stands out is how so many of the Commonwealth’s goals are being enabled by innovative businesses and technologies developed right here in Massachusetts. Solar films, wind businesses, storage technologies and a myriad of other solutions are all contributing on a local and national level to the global energy challenge. Even Zipcar’s car-sharing business model makes an impact — changing the fundamental economics around car-based transportation and the per-driver greenhouse gas (GHG) impact.

As a card-carrying member of the lighting industry, I heard a loud call to arms for my cluster of companies in the Building Efficiency section of the presentation. Undersecretary Cash is emphatic that a $2 billion investment in energy efficiency will drive $6 billion in savings and help reduce building’s energy use by 20 percent. A huge contribution to that number can come from lighting, which is typically the first or second largest user of electricity in most buildings and, until recently, an antiquated technology despite being a critical element of every home or business environment.

I believe that the Next Generation Lighting Cluster will have a bigger impact on the economy, energy and jobs in the Commonwealth than solar and wind combined. Lighting is a more natural fit for Massachusetts’ technology economy. Lighting uses 25 percent of the energy in our environment — I do not see that amount being produced soon by wind and solar. And, lighting requires no complicated permitting or power purchase agreements. There is no NIMBY in lighting – or in energy efficiency. Of course, I support the continued push towards sustainable generation technologies, but efficiency needs the type of effort and focus that has been so effective for the solar and wind industries.

The Massachusetts Next-Generation Lighting Cluster

Massachusetts is making significant and creative contributions that are rapidly advancing the lighting industry. That work is happening in leading academic institutions as well as in companies — both big and small — and many of those initiatives and products are focused on energy efficiency so that the way lighting is used and the amount of energy it consumes can evolve.

So who are the participants? From an academic perspective, there is the Boston University SmartLighting Center, which “seeks to create a leadership position in the drive to the next revolution in lighting using solid-state devices manufactured with silicon.” A partnership among Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of New Mexico, the ERC is funded by the National Science Foundation. On the other side of the river, the MIT Media Lab continues to pursue numerous lighting-related initiatives in their portfolio.

In the private sector, companies involved in lighting in Massachusetts run the gamut from device and component manufacturers to complete systems developers. There are established industry giants – Philips Color Kinetics, Philips Lightolier and Osram Sylvania.  These companies are household names with products designed for numerous applications – ranging from residential to highly specialized architectural, to automotive and more. Then there are companies like QD Vision, which is focused on lighting and display solutions, and Luminus Devices, which develops LEDs for a variety of general illumination and projection applications. The list goes on, but the general thread is that these companies are all busily advancing lighting technology — from LED chips and devices to finished, customer-ready products — and bringing them to market in a variety of different solutions.

There are also other companies that are integrating multiple control technologies with lighting to drive even greater energy efficiency. (Disclosure: Digital Lumens is one of those.)  In this case, these companies are tapping into deep wells of Massachusetts-based expertise in software and networking to integrate LEDs, controls and networking to multiply the energy-savings benefits far beyond what is possible with LEDs, alone. Still other companies in the region are focused on standalone controls that they integrate with other light fixtures in the after market so that lighting can be better managed.

So how does this cluster support the Commonwealth’s goals? By advancing the state of the art of LEDs, which are — by far — the most energy efficient illumination source available. These advances can then be rapidly incorporated into market-ready solutions that have tangible, bottom-line impact on energy use and GHG emissions.

And, Massachusetts — in pursuing these aggressive goals and developing and proving the technologies that help reach them, will show the rest of the United States how embracing energy efficiency can help transform the economy.

By Rodney Brown

A few hours ago I was standing at the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway at the end of High Street in downtown Boston watching a free concert by the original indie band, They Might Be Giants, to honor the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

Twelve years ago, when I started working for Mass High Tech, our offices looked out over that very same spot, but it was obscured by the deck of the Central Artery that came within 20 yards of our fourth floor windows. Underneath it, shaded by the many tons of steel girders and concrete decking, was a mass of enormous holes, construction equipment, and more hardhat-wearing union workers than you could shake an accordion at.

What a difference a decade-plus makes.

While the good folks at radio station WXRV (92.5, The River) certainly did a good job at getting the word out that TMBG was going to be playing, nobody anticipated the sea of people that stretched for blocks along the sun-drenched greenway. Meanwhile, far underneath but completely undetectable, all of that traffic that used to ride along the elevated highway was humming along through the most expensive public building project in the history of the United States, the Central Artery Tunnel.

Or, as TMBG co-founder and guitarist John Flansburgh put it to the crowd, “You are on the only greenway made up entirely of money!”

Flansburgh, who started the band with keyboardist and accordion wizard John Linnell, also gave a nod to the nerds in the crowd, when he said they can get the band’s songs for free. “Just Google ‘They Might Be Giants’ and ‘bit-torrent’,” he said.

Music piracy aside, I can think of no better way to celebrate the official day to be green than on the newest stretch of green in the city of Boston, listening to a band sing about the sun – or the elements.