ARTICLE

INTERIORS: Light Beyond Illumination – Harsh Chitale, Philips

Done properly, lighting can highlight a room’s assets and help disguise its shortcomings, increase function, and set a mood. The article is based on discussion GRIHA Team had with Harshavardhan Chitale, Vice Chairman & MD-Philips Lighting India.

GRIHA: What according to you is the opportunity in Indian market?
H Chitale: India ranks amongst the top-5 focus markets for Philips Lighting globally, as there is a huge potential for growth of lighting products, especially LED. Over the past two years, there has been a tremendous growth in the LED market, owing to increased awareness amongst consumers and the government’s initiatives such as DELP.

We would like to contribute in driving growth of LED products across all segments - consumer, professional and public infrastructure. In addition to being energy efficient, LED products can be wirelessly connected, which can further reduce consumption cost. Lighting accounts for close to 18-20% of total power consumption in the world and hence a switch to LED can significantly reduce energy bills.

We at Philips Lighting are actively driving product innovation to accelerate LED adoption and in the last one year we launched close to 200 new LED products for the Indian market, products that are exclusively designed and developed for the Indian market requirements and meet local price expectations.

GRIHA: What is the extent of energy saving in LED products?
H Chitale: In urban areas the major drivers of energy consumption are households, organizations and public infrastructure/street lighting. Thanks to an increased awareness about energy efficiency, there has been a significant growth in demand for LED products owing to their lower power consumption.

Organizations are upgrading to LED lighting as it offers high return on investment; over 75% of our current sales in the segment are LED products, with larger organizations now opting for smart connected intelligent lighting, which generates an additional 30% energy savings over and above the 50% savings by normal LED’s. State governments are also increasingly contributing. With more than 3 crore street lamps lit for about 10 hours a day, there is significant scope for reducing energy consumption through LED.

GRIHA: Do you see a good scope in Indian urban setting?
H Chitale: Smart street lighting has a huge potential in a vast country like India with more than 5,000 towns and 100 large cities, which together have an installation base of almost 3 crore street lights. Connected street lighting can generate significant energy savings in the cities through their smart monitoring and regulation as per weather, traffic and public usage requirements.

Globally, we have implemented our City Touch connected street lighting solution in more than 250 cities in 31 countries and some key installations are in London (UK), Surakarta (Indonesia), Los Angeles (USA), Greater Toronto (Canada) and Buenos Aires (Argentina).

In Naya Raipur, the new capital of Chhattisgarh, we have installed India’s first smart street lighting management system, wherein LED Street lights in the city are connected to a remote monitoring system via GPRS, allowing the city development authority (NRDA) to remotely monitor, manage and control these LED street lights. The system can generate automated reports highlighting energy savings, real time power consumption data, fault alerts and power theft alerts as well. Light output of the LED street lights can also be managed remotely for different LUX level requirements as per the daily schedule.

GRIHA: To what extent has government’s DELP contributed in promoting LED bulbs?
H Chitale: The Indian government has taken several initiatives to encourage the adoption of energy efficient LED lighting solutions. Through the DELP program, the government is offering LED bulbs at subsidized rates to consumers and the huge volumes generated by this scheme has substantially brought down production cost of LED products in the last 18 months.

More importantly, this program has created a tremendous awareness about LED’s amongst consumers, which in turn has increased overall demand. However, the bulbs offered under the DELP program only constitute a small portion of the overall market requirement as they are limited to 4 pieces of 7W bulbs per household - there is customer demand for different wattage bulbs, and this people will buy from open market.

GRIHA: What is the general formula for selecting lights for different rooms?
H Chitale: The right lighting fixtures play a significant role in increasing the aesthetic value of any room. Some important factors to be kept in mind while choosing the lighting for a room include the room dimensions, timing, usage, wall colours and the ceiling. A room needs a lighting product that can create different settings to suit different needs (relaxing, energizing and entertaining) during different timings of the day. Philips Hue offers app-based dynamic lighting that creates different scenes through use of colours that can be changed at the touch of a finger using your smartphone. You can even store different colour settings in the app that can be automatically switched on when you enter your room.

GRIHA: How does lighting affect the mood of the bedroom? What would you recommend for bedside lighting?
H Chitale: Lamps are centric for any bedside lighting. While we mostly concentrate on the design and style of lamp, we overlook the significance of positioning it and the quantity of light to be incorporated. It helps to have multiple light sources to control the mood and the ambience of the room. One can experiment around with varied effects by changing the light brightness, intensity and colours.

Lighting plays a significant role in setting the mood of a room. The lighting fixture should be chosen to match the décor and usage. Warm lighting can help you relax after a long day at work, whereas cool white lighting is useful when you are reading or watching TV. Using Philips Hue you can explore endless possibilities with just one product, enabling you to personalize your lighting.

We have come up with a wide range of lamps and home decorative lighting, well categorized depending on the technology used, power consumption, colour, and so on. It broadly includes tube lights, CFLs and LED lamps. Our most popular home lighting products include Living Colors, a table lamp that can match lighting with moods through personalized colours. Then there is Philips Cielo, a suspension lamp that combines the qualities of a classic lamp with modern innovations and brings out a magical effect. We are also expanding our Philips Hue range of personal wireless smart lighting system for homes.