4E Solid State Lighting Annex

Solid State Lighting (SSL) has the potential to provide artificial lighting more efficiently than prevalent current technologies at competitive lifetime costs.  However the wide variation in performance of SSL sources currently in the market severely threatens consumer confidence in SSL lighting, delaying market acceptance and slowing down penetration rates.

The goal of the annex is to develop simple tools to help government and consumers world-wide quickly and confidently identify which SSL lighting products have the necessary efficiencies and quality levels to effectively reduce the amount of energy that is currently consumed by artificial lighting.

This annex aims to work internationally to support the work that is being done on a national level to address the main challenges with SSL technologies: there is a lack of confidence with SSL, governments don't have the tools they need to determine which SSL products are good investments, and everyone needs straightforward, reliable and internationally recognised procedures to test for basic SSL quality.

Main tasks of the SSL Annex

The three main tasks of the Annex are:

1. Develop SSL Quality Assurance - work to clarify the SSL market worldwide, reduce the risks in using SSL and provide governments and consumers recommendations that they can trust when investing in SSL products.  This task includes the development of generic performance tiers for various SSL products as well as life-cycle and health impact analyses of the SSL technology.
2. Harmonize SSL Performance Testing - work with global testing labs to increase the quality and confidence of SSL labs' test results, work to assess a range of existing SSL test procedures and build a system of testing that is manageable, robust and acceptable to a broad range of stakeholders.  In mid October 2012, the 2013 Interlaboratory testing program was launched.  This program invites lighting laboratories from around the world to participate.  See the Annex website for more details.
3. Standards and Accreditation - work with existing accreditation bodies to develop a structure for world-wide interim reliability of SSL testing labs' performance data.

For further information visit the SSL Annex website at http://ssl.iea-4e.org/