Trying to further cement an economic identity as a center for sustainable and green businesses, officials recently announced a company selling energy efficient LED lights is coming to Tech City in Kingston.
It will join LitGreen, a Poughkeepsie-based company that has already undertaken some high-profile projects in the Hudson Valley to show the efficacy of LED lights.
LEDs America, a Jupiter, Fla.-based company doing its manufacturing in China, is leasing up to 10,000 square feet at the manufacturing and office complex to expand its business, said its CEO, Joel Westermarck at an announcement Oct. 27 attended by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley, and Vincent Cozzolino, co-CEO of The Solar Energy Consortium, known as TSEC.
Westermarck said the company hopes to hire up to 100 people by the end of next year. A Hinchey spokesman said no federal aid was involved, other than support for TSEC, which helped bring the company in. There was no announcement about state aid being involved.
The company”™s products are made in China according to designs it has developed. The intent is to use the Ulster County plant to assemble and test lighting units and ship them to customers in North America and South America, while the Chinese site will continue to supply the rest of the world markets.
Westermarck said the plan is to make more of the components in America, over time, as the business develops.
“To be honest with you, the more the merrier,” said Andy Neal, founder of LitGreen, which has custom-designed LED lighting systems for systems as varied as the Walkway Over the Hudson to lighting fixtures made to function within historic streetlights at West Point and the town of Lloyd.
“We are not competitors,” Neal said about LEDs America setting up shop across the river in Tech City. “They do something very different from us, they import equipment to existing sockets, which is not anything we do. Their market is really mass market and good luck to them. It”™s a huge market.”
One product by LEDs America is a 48-inch tube designed to replace fluorescent ones for use in commercial buildings. The capital cost of such tubes is much higher, but Westermarck said the tube uses about 15 watts versus the 40 watts for a conventional tube, saving users money over time. He said his tubes have a life of about 50,000 hours. Westermarck said the product can produce 94 lumens per watt, which is a threshold that makes the product practical as a replacement for fluorescents because its long-term operating costs are lower. This point has only been reached recently in the industry, he said.
LitGreen has patented an IllumaTube, a system that can be customized to meet the needs of any customer, indoors or out, and under extremely trying conditions.
“The whole LitGreen concept is we provide custom lighting solutions to problems that exist today,” Neal said. While his company designed the lights on the Walkway, LEDs America was not equipped for such custom applications. He said both companies fit nicely in the Hudson Valley”™s burgeoning energy efficiency corridor.
TSEC has had a hand in bringing both companies to the area and “It could very well be the beginning of an LED cluster,” said Nancy Cozean, the vice president for communication for LitGreen. She said the idea of energy efficient Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) which use only about one-fifth of the energy of conventional bulbs and last far longer, is a natural fit with efforts to foster solar energy jobs and other green industry in the area.
Westermarck sees the situation in much the same light.
“Our organization is very excited to join the growing solar technology cluster in the Hudson Valley,” he said. “We look forward to growing our company alongside these others and to helping the country become more energy-efficient.”
