Lamp manufacturer Soraa is urging the US Environment Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star programme to create an improved colour rendering category in its energy efficient lamp specification.
Energy Star is a voluntary US government programme aimed at defining the performance characteristics of high energy efficiency products and Soraa is proposing the EPA introduce a second higher CRI tier to its lamp specification which would raise colour quality to a minimum of 90Ra. For lamps with a CRI between 80 and 90, Soraa is also calling for an increase to the luminous efficacy requirement by an additional 5 lm/W.
The company says Energy Star’s current standards encourage manufacturers to produce modest colour quality lamps. Soraa believes its proposal will increase overall energy savings through greater adoption of higher light quality lamps as well as through higher energy efficiency in lamps of modest light quality.
In his comments on draft four of the Energy Star requirements product specification for lamps, Mike Krames Soraa’s chief technology officer, said: “In the absence of a second high CRI tier, it is likely that, similar to the historical situation with CFL, the vast majority of lamp products will perform close to the lower boundaries of quality requirements as set in the Energy Star lamp specification. Left unaddressed, this lack of high colour quality lighting products will lead to a stalling in consumer adoption of energy efficient lighting technology.”
Support for higher colour rendering has also come from the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD) and the California Lighting Technology Center, a lighting technology research base which is part of the UC Davis University of California.
On Soraa’s website, Krames said: “The energy star qualification must be associated with LED lamps that provide a better quality of light; otherwise, the program will start to lack credibility with end-users and the low adoption rate history of CFLs will be repeated by LED lamps.”
