WOW! Congratulations to my old colleagues at lightly for winning the hugely prestigious U.S. Department of Energy L-Prize competition! They won a $375,000 award for the Low-Carbon Biodegradable Luminaire Track. For a small team like Lightly, this is a HUGE boost and well deserved! Congrats to Sean Darras, Gregory Page, Benjamin Rapkin, Max Ehrlich and so many other people on the team who drove this to reality.

It was a decade-plus journey for me to see my vision for a radically simplified, sustainable linear pendant brought to market, with several false starts (such as this one). To see such a product making a HUGE impact in the North American lighting market gives me hope that REAL change is actually possible in this world.

And special thanks to everyone at the U.S. DOE’s Building Technologies Office at the Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy for embracing my evangelizing “radical sustainability for cost savings” since way back in 2012! I preached the story at about 4 SSL R+D Workshops over the years!

The L-Prize is led by DOE’s Building Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with lead technical support from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

#lightly #koernerdesign #sustainability #decarbonization