Cree announced their plans to convert all lighting in their headquarters and manufacturing facility to lighting fixtures with Cree XLamp LEDs.
I don’t know…..does anybody else out there feel like Cree’s announcement to adopt LED lighting in their headquarters and manufacturing facility seems a bit odd? Don’t you feel like Cree should have already been using LEDs everywhere? I mean, the CEO should have XLamps surgically implanted in his forehead. Hay! Headlamps! Get it? <insert groans here> That was my initial reaction and I suspect that might be the initial reactions of a lot of people, including Cree’s customers.
Releasing this announcement to the newswire does illustrate Cree’s commitment to developing efficient LED technology that will eventually replace traditional lighting but at the same time it highlights the fact that LED luminaires are fairly new and LED technology costly (initially)as compared to traditional lamps which is something that not even Cree, who makes the darn things, could ignore ,further illustrating that Cree hasn’t been using them which can be disconcerting to customers. On a more positive note: Kudos to Cree for launching the LED Workplace website (www.ledworkplace.org) which looks like it will be a terrific place to exchange information about LED luminaire data and cost savings on workplace LED installations.
Also, in the release it says “in total the new LED lights use 48% less energy than the incandescent, fluorescent and high-pressure sodium lights they replaced” Uh…commercially available Cree XLamp LEDs are not more efficient then HP Sodium lights and produce nowhere near as much light over as broad an area. I don’t think we’ll be seeing LEDs replace sodium vapor lamps anytime soon. Perhaps chock that up to an over-zealous PR writer? 
Click here to read the full announcement at LEDs Magazine
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November 7, 2007 at 10:05 am |
Craig,
At the ASM last week, CEO Swoboda talked about how some people in the company thought that Cree had moved too slowly in this direction, but Cree is still in the vanguard.
The thing that I thought was most important about the LED luminaires that Cree has installed so far is that all but one of the products used are production products. The exception was a ‘beta’ version of a beautiful troffer by LLF.
Cree has shown examples/mock-ups of SSL in the past, but at this ASM practically all of the luminaires and flashlights were production products. That gives you some idea of the progress made over the last few years.
Jim