Pentagon goes green with Cree 4,200 LED Fixtures

Cree Inc. announced that it will supply more than 4,200 recessed LED fixtures for part of the Pentagon called Wedge 5.

According to Cree, The LEDs are expected to use 22 percent less power than the fluorescent lights they will replace, enough to pay back their extra cost in four years. Cree would not disclose details of the Pentagon contract — it’s part of a long line of government deals for Cree dating back to the company’s founding — but the company said the fixtures retail for about $380 apiece.

LEDs are power-sippers compared to incandescent and fluorescent lights, and they’re already in wide use for traffic lights, billboards and other outdoor applications. But their higher costs remain an obstacle to bringing them to indoor lighting. Still, the U.S. Department of Energy says that LED lighting use saved the country about 8.7 trillion watt hours in 2007, and that bringing LEDs to wider use in indoor lighting and 11 other untapped markets could save the country 27 gigawatts of power.

Cree is among the lighting companies eager to buy up promising startups that can serve customers looking for those kinds of potential energy savings. The company has spent $303 million on acquisitions in the last two years, including buying LED Lighting Fixtures for about $77 million in cash and stock in February.

Philips Lighting is also spending big on fledgling lighting companies — $5.4 billion in acquisitions from 2005 to 2007 — and has launched a line of LED indoor lights.

Startups in the LED field include Luminus Devices in Billerica, Mass., which raised $72 million in venture capital in March, and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based BridgeLux, which raised $40 million in April.

The Pentagon’s move to LEDs would appear to fit in with President-elect Barack Obama’s promise to make the federal government more energy-efficient.

Obama’s campaign called for retrofitting existing federal buildings to make them 25-percent more energy-efficient in the next five years, as well as a promise to make sure all new federal buildings were 40-percent more energy-efficient in the same time frame. The long-term goal is to decrease the government’s energy usage by 15 percent by 2015.

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