Energy-saving LED lighting arrives

When a fisherman casts his net out at night, he needs to mark its perimeter with tiny lights so that another boat does not move in unwittingly and damage the net. These lights, so far tiny kerosene lamps, can now be replaced by tinier LED (light emitting diode) lamps, which consume a fraction of the energy that the traditional lamps do.

 

A temporary hut of a nomadic tribe in the Kutch area of Gujarat is now lit up at night, not by the traditional kerosene fed lantern but an LED-based lamp, which draws power from a standard battery that is charged by a solar panel. The whole setup is robust enough that it does not require any servicing for two years.

 

A smaller LED lamp, which can replace a wick lamp, once charged for 5-6 hours, can emit full light for four hours. It is being developed for a leading NGO, which wants to use them in villages as an employment generating device, which can be hired out.

While these three are not yet fully commercialised, an LED emergency lamp, looking like a lantern, is commercially out with what is considered winning efficiency – giving 10-12 hours backup after a similar period of charging, when most emergency lamps last only for a couple of hours after getting fully charged.

The key point in all these new generation LED lamps is that they are hugely energy saving and, once production volumes are achieved, will be so priced as to allow the user to recover initial capital costs in a few months.

These are being produced and developed by Bangalore-based InnovLite, a four-year-old technology startup whose turnover is trebling every year and reached Rs 1.2 crore in 2007-08. BR Raghav, director, the person behind the venture, asserts it is profitable and expects to reach a turnover of over Rs 6 crore in the current year.

It hopes to successfully negotiate a $5 million first round of venture capital funding, which will go into setting up an assembly line that will be able to support a turnover of Rs 50 crore by next year (2009-10). It is being mentored by K Ganesh, the serial entrepreneur whose latest venture is TutorVista, the online tutoring venture.

InnovLite’s products are all designed by it and put together from commercially available components, with only the LED element imported. Raghav, a 44 year old electrical and electronics engineer who earlier ran a data storage venture, has not cared to patent his products but bases his business model on being a moving target which is difficult for emulators to beat.

His forte is a combination of early start, rapid commercialisation and quick scaling. By the time a challenger arrives InnovLite has moved on, powered by the same kind of improvement in the efficiency of LED devices as is benchmarked by Moore’s law in the case of semiconductors.

Global lighting players find it difficult to come up with such do-it-yourself solutions because, he says, their development costs are high and they have legacy problems. Such products will also tend to cannibalise their existing products.

The lamps for homes and micro businesses are InnovLite’s newer products. Where it has already arrived is in providing lighting solutions to large business establishments. The common area lighting for the India centre of a global retailing firm and the internal lighting for a development centre of a Fortune 50 IT firm have been provided by it.

They all lead to 60 per cent energy saving which recoups the 20 per cent higher capital cost in six months.