Revenues from LED lighting products in commercial building markets are projected to grow from $2.7 billion in 2013 to more than $25 billion in 2021, according to a recent report from Navigant Research.
When LEDs were first introduced for general space lighting they were expensive, not very efficient, and too dim. Today, LED-based lighting products can successfully compete with rival technologies on the basis of light quality, efficiency, dimmability, and almost any other important metric except for price – which is falling rapidly.
“The rise of LED technology will transform every part of the commercial lighting industry,” says Jesse Foote, research analyst at Navigant Research. “While other lighting technologies have limited potential for future improvements, new designs for LEDs that push quality and efficacy to new levels continue to emerge from lighting labs around the world.”
In the coming years, LED prices are expected to fall to a point where savings from electricity consumption will provide a short payback period that will encourage consumer adoption en masse, according to the report. This shift will be most dramatic in the share of lamps sold for retrofit projects, where older lighting is often replaced specifically to improve efficiency. Although Navigant Research forecasts that only 5 percent of lamps sold to retrofit projects worldwide in 2013 will be LED-based, that share is expected to grow to 40 percent by 2017 and 63 percent by 2021.
The full report is available from Navigant Research.
