On Dec. 12, Nobel Laureate in Physics Hiroshi Amano visited the Swedish Energy Agency for a seminar on implementation and future trends in LED lighting. Rensselaer lighting experts Mark Rea, Mariana Figueiro, and Dan Frering of the Lighting Research Center (LRC) attended the meeting, with Director General Erik Brandsma, Thomas Sandvall, and Peter Bennich of the Swedish Energy Agency, researchers from Lund University, and representatives from the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications.
Hiroshi Amano
This year, the Nobel Prize, which is awarded only to inventions of greatest benefit to humankind, was presented to the inventors of the blue LED, and Hiroshi Amano, Isamu Akasaki, and Shuji Nakamura were in Stockholm attending an official banquet to receive their awards.
At the Swedish Energy Agency meeting, Amano discussed the energy situation in Japan after the earthquake in Fukushima, after which most nuclear plants closed. He said that it is important to find more renewable energy sources but also to use energy more efficiently, and noted that the LED will play an important role in helping Japan to decrease its energy use. Amano is currently conducting research on different materials and especially new areas of deployment for nitride, such as solar cells.
The Swedish Energy Agency, a government agency for national energy policy issues, has been an LRC Partner since 2010 and has collaborated on and funded several high-profile research projects. At the Dec. 12 meeting, the most recent project, titled “Swedish Healthy Home”—a collaboration between the Swedish Energy Agency, LRC, and Lund University—was officially launched. The goal of the “Swedish Healthy Home” project is to develop an advanced lighting system that supports human health and well-being while reducing energy consumption.