The impact of energy efficiency indicators on the office lighting planning and its implications for office lighting market

Office lighting planners are faced with two key objectives as their plans should meet customers' needs and also be compliant with a range of policy guidelines targeted on a wide variety of lighting attributes. In the EU, the most recent relevant guidelines are led by the "2030 climate & energy framework" which among other targets calls for a more energy efficient office lighting planning. The new guidelines foresee stricter energy standards and therefore add to the complexity of the lighting planning task since they notably reduce the number of available luminaires, at least in the short-run. Although important for the industry, a thorough examination of current and forthcoming policies impact on the market of luminaires has yet to be conducted in a European context. The present paper seeks to cover this lack in the relevant literature by focusing in a European country, namely this of Greece, in order to capture the effects of various European and national policy guidelines in the market of luminaires. In order to enhance the validity of results a total number of 9,609 office luminaires available to the European market were selected. After controlling for any data misspecifications an extended statistical analysis was conducted in order to extract the composition of the market taking into account technical characteristics as the type and purpose of use of each luminaire, their luminous efficacy, their color temperature and color rendering index and some other attributes that affect luminaires' compliance level with the policy guidelines but also their adequacy for being included in an effective lighting plan. The method employed by the present paper is expected to support future policy making as it adds a sound quantitative basis for examining any policy impacts but also the lighting planners to understand the current state but also the future trends of the market and adjust accordingly their future luminaires selections. The luminous efficacy analysis has shown that about 48% of the current office luminaires fail to pass the 85 lm/W threshold being set by EU. Only 5% and 13% of the luminaires can be used for general lighting and task lighting correspondingly for an energy efficient lighting design without resulting in a larger number of luminaires than it is needed.