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Thursday, June 24, 2010
Digital Lumens CEO Pincince: Full LED systems save big bucks
By Kyle Alspach
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When Tom Pincince joined advanced lighting firm Digital Lumens Inc. as CEO more than a year ago, he expected to spend the first two years in “evangelical mode.”
That’s because Digital Lumens, based in Boston, is offering a first-of-its-kind product, according to Pincince. The company’s lighting system combines LED technology with networking and software, to create a super-efficient lighting system that can be easily controlled wirelessly, he said.
“I thought we would have this sort of fight to create a category and create interest,” Pincince said. “That’s absolutely not happening.”
In January, Digital Lumens began shipping its first smart lighting systems to industrial customers (who are not currently being named by the company). Founded in 2008, the company has been backed by $11.3 million in venture capital from Flybridge Capital Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Black Coral Capital.
Pincince and Digital Lumens marketing director Allison Parker recently sat down for an interview with Mass High Tech. What follows is a portion of that discussion.
Mass High Tech: What market opportunity are you seeking to take advantage of?
Pincince: Our customer base is industrial customers – warehouse, manufacturing, heavy production. Lighting is 15 to 35 percent of their overall energy profile. They are using 30- to 50-year-old technology, so they are ripe for a change in the way they think about that energy profile ... Our customers are spending about $1 per square foot per year just on lighting. So for our customers that have a quarter million, to a half million square feet to a million square feet under a single roof – that’s a lot of money.
MHT: What do you offer your customers?
Pincince: We say that we’re going to give you 100 percent of light you have, or better, for 10 percent of the energy cost. We’re going to do that with new technology, LED-based, and a whole solution that takes LEDs and marries them with technologies it has a natural affinity for. LEDs are semiconductors. We marry that with networking and software for a comprehensive system that gives you all that light, all that energy savings and a newfound control over how your light works.
Parker: LEDs alone give you savings. But when you begin to get really, really smart about how you manage them, there’s another order of magnitude of energy efficiency. So you’re going to get a dividend by just going LED, but if you go smart – or in our case, we tend to refer to them as intelligent lighting systems, because there is so much in there – that’s when you really can drive down the costs.
MHT: Are any other companies offering a similar product?
Pincince: Everyone else’s approach is what I call the “dumb LED” approach. I’ve not seen anyone else doing a fully integrated system. Intelligence really does drive down the cost ... The whole idea here is it’s intelligent, it’s efficient, it’s complete. There’s no one else who’s taking that approach.
MHT: Tell me about the environmental benefits of these systems.
Parker: With a 250,000 square foot facility, reducing that much energy demand (through installing the lighting systems) is equal to taking around 110 homes off the grid, or doing an energy tune-up on 2,000 houses. By doing one of these facilities, you get a tremendous benefit in one fell swoop.
Pincince: As a nation, we’re trying to reduce our [environmental] footprint. But it’s a lot easier to go convince a commercial customer to install our lighting system than it is to walk up and down the streets trying to convince every apartment dweller to reduce their energy use.
MHT: What does your staff look like?
Pincince: We have hired staff that has LED lighting experience, hired folks who come from networking and distributed computing environments – we’ve hired straight software people. That cohort together is working to build that solution. The staff is just under 20.
MHT: What are your plans for expansion?
Pincince: We’re looking to expand more aggressively not just nationally, but internationally. Other parts of the world are spending even more money than we are ... We also expect to expand our footprint in terms of what we can do inside buildings. We think we could expand what we’re doing into entire smart buildings.
MHT: How quickly do your lighting systems pay for themselves?
Pincince: Two years.
MHT: That seems very short compared to renewable energy systems.
Pincince: I think as you think about cogeneration or solar or other things, [this lighting system] offers a near-term payback. But we’re going to have to take multiple approaches to solving the nation’s problem. And as you think about photovoltaics or other types of generation, if you’ve reduced the load, the PV is actually creating a larger percentage of the energy needs. You can actually begin to bring down its actual payback. What you’re actually seeing in some ideas is pairing an energy efficiency measure like lighting with a renewable energy technology. That being said, if you’re running a building and you haven’t changed your lights, stop everything, change your lights, and then go think about the next thing to do. Because it really is the lowest hanging fruit of everything out there.
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