| Overview
Company Description: Luminoptics is now operating under the trade name Lumenergi see www.lumenergi.com. The company develops and sells energy efficient lighting technologies for commercial and industrial buildings. The products are low cost dimming electronic ballasts (DEB) for common fluorescent lights and an innovative software package to control lighting under multiple desired scenarios – the "Lighting Management Control System" or LMCS. Lumenergi products are unique because together they enable dynamic lighting control schemes that result in appropriately lighting task areas with the minimum energy expenditure, thereby reducing energy costs from lighting by up to 70%.
Problem/Solution: Many installed lighting systems are wasteful, or too expensive to control, or both. Putting the intelligence in lighting systems, at the right cost point, is critical to solving this problem. The Lumenergi solution offers both an innovative hardware capability via the dimming ballast, as well as, a software control network designed to take advantage of the dimming hardware capability. While many dimming ballasts exist today, they are not cost competitive with standard, non-dimming electronic ballasts. Lumenergi changes this equation – its technology promises to deliver the sophisticated control capability at the same price of non-dimming alternatives.
Product Offering: The Lumenergi DEB when combined with the LMCS offers considerable improvement over existing ballasts and controls. The Lumenergi DEB is a true micro processor controlled product (unique to the industry) that uses a high performance microchip to monitor and control ballast functions to assure superior performance at low cost while interfacing with most control systems. Other ballast products are typically unable to interoperate with other vendors’ control systems. By contrast, the Lumenergi ballast is designed to work with all known control systems available in the market today; and, at the same time, the Lumenergi LMCS system communicates with other vendors’ ballast products as well.
Team: The two founders of Luminoptics - Steve Stevens and Bill Alling - have worked together in the lighting industry over the last 3 decades. They have extensive industry networks and invaluable knowledge on the Lumenergi core product offering, as well the timing of the market opportunity the company currently faces. They are joined by ten other professionals with diverse industry knowledge covering lighting, energy, real estate and hardware and software development.
Patent Portfolio: The Company’s products represent some 3-4 decades of invention, many patents and a deep expertise in lighting industry design and development. These patents surround the “distributed intelligence” design inherent in our ballast, and the capabilities in regulating voltage and frequency across multiple power outputs, in keeping with the requirements of a cost efficient and a “manufacturing sensible” design. There are other patents addressing power quality, electric demand modulation, dimming capabilities, and power line communication, all issued and assigned to the Company.
Marketplace: The market for ballast sales is greater than 2 billion units worldwide (700 million units in the USA alone). Luminoptics end use customers include C&I, as well as residential buildings. Low cost and higher functionality enables Lumenergi to elevate DEBs now limited to relatively niche use, to become the dominant market solution enabling full building-wide energy management, and thus the ability to supply demand responsiveness.
Demand Response: In addition to the energy savings that lighting controls offer customers, demand response is an important value proposition to control available power (energy) on the grid to provide a new kind of "spinning reserve" to avoid interuptions and blackouts leading to greater system stability. The intelligence in Lumenergi ballasts enables lighting control in a way that has previously been unavailable. Lighting makes up almost 24% of energy consumption throughout the U.S. and may now be used to respond in real-time in much the same way as energy generating resources like peaker power plants.
Team & Advisors:
C.R. (Steve) Stevens, Chairman, CTO and Co-Founder
William R. (Bill) Alling, Executive V.P. and Co-Founder
John R. Domingos, General Counsel & Co-Founder, Acting CFO
Albert Lam, Senior VP Operations, Engineering and Manufacturing
Timothy Parry, V.P. Software Engineering
Simon Chen, Contract Manufacturing
Edward Beardsworth, Advisory Board Member, Energy Vertical
Robert (Bob) MacDonald, Advisory Board Member, Strategic Sales & Marketing
Steven R. Meckfessel, Advisory Board Member, Real Estate Vertical
Lighting Control Strategies, when fully implemented by the Lumenergi products, accounts for an up to a 70% energy savings not including reduced air conditioning loads. These include.
1. Daylight Harvesting – lowering lighting levels in response to increased natural daylight
2. Task Tuning – reducing lighting levels in accordance with occupant work requirements and standards.
3. Scheduling – automatically dimming or turning off lights when space is vacant, or in response to changed requirements such as cleaning or security.
4. Lumen Depreciation – compensating for degrading lamp lumen output
5. Load Shedding – reducing lighting levels to releive electric supply grid overload, thus reducing the need for spinning reserves such as "peaker" power plants.
6. Personal Control - allows occupants to adjust their lighting levels for comfort.
Dimmable Ballast Economics. Perhaps the single greatest deterrent to widespread adoption of dimming electronic ballasts has been the high initial cost of dimming hardware and installation. Currently available technologies for dimming electronic ballasts provide a payback in approximately 7 years. This is part of the reason that most penetration of this technology has been in "high profile" installations like boardrooms, conference rooms and foyers and entrances. Luminoptic’s products are projected to achieve a payback of approximately one-three years by Year 3 of our plan, and a payback of less than two years across the broad market by Year 5.
Competition: The competitive landscape includes major and entrenched players in the lighting field, as well as new entrants. For the DEB segment, there are four major active players – Lutron, Advance Transformer, Universal, and OSRAM/Sylvania. The DEB space is somewhat nascent and widespread adoption has been awaiting a solution with intelligent dimming capability and broad interoperability, but at a competitive cost to the entrenched alternatives. Also, there is increasing awareness of lighting control strategies given the continued high cost of energy and increasing importance placed on demand response and conservation. It is in this space where there are other technology based startups that appear to be more focused on software solutions with existing installed equipment, rather than additional capabilities offered by our dimming ballast.
Manufacturing & Distribution: Lumenergi has contracted with a medium sized production company in Mainland China, supported from the USA, with one full time engineer located in China.
The Company plans to take advantage of the existing, highly optimized, and mature product distribution network found in the industry today. There are two primary channels: fixture and controls original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and electrical distributors including ESCOs.
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