US DOE publishes Lighting Market

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has just published its third-ever “US Lighting Market Characterization” (LMC) report that the agency uses in part to guide its research and development (R&D) program. The report documents the installed base, total energy used, and lumen output of all general lighting products operating in the US, with the new report covering that data as of the end of 2015.

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The most recent LMC was published in 2012 and covered the market as of the end of 2010. At that time, the installed base of solid-state lighting (SSL) was nascent and the energy savings relative to lighting that were reported in the document were mostly tied to adoption of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) in place of incandescent lamps, and transition from T12 fluorescent tubes to T8 and T5 tubes.

The new report provides a much better indication of the impact of LEDs on the general lighting market, although it also clearly states that LEDs had only penetrated 8% of the total installed base at the end of 2015. Still, the electrical use today for all types of lighting is 641 TWh or 17% of the total electricity used in the US. Back in 2012, the report stated that lighting accounted for 700 TWh of electricity or 19% of total energy used.