The U.S. Department of Energy's CALiPER program has released a Snapshot Report on outdoor area lighting, which utilizes the LED Lighting Facts® program's extensive product database to help industry stakeholders understand the current state and trajectory of the market for LED outdoor area and roadway, parking garage, and canopy luminaires.

Among the key findings:

•While all three outdoor categories included products that exceeded 100 lm/W, all three also included products that were below 50 lm/W. The majority emitted between 70 and 90 lm/W, which was generally as good as or better than the incumbent lighting systems.

•In the roadway category, few LED products appear to be suitable alternatives to 400 W high-pressure sodium luminaires, and in general, fewer and fewer are listed with LED Lighting Facts as the lumen output range increases. This is one area of poten­tial future growth for LED products.

•Although represented by a smaller sample, LED canopy luminaires tended to have slightly higher efficacies, as well as higher color temperatures, and more of them exceeded 100 lm/W than either of the other categories.

•LED outdoor area luminaires have a wide variety of color quality attri­butes, with CRIs mostly between 60 and 80, and CCTs generally between 4000K and 6000K. Generalized comparisons between color qual­ity and efficacy may be misleading, given the wide variety of individual product performance.

Download a PDF of the full report.