Nordic Power Converters makes drivers for LED lighting which are smaller, use less power, and provide better light quality than any competitor. And the Danish tech Company just won the Lighting For Good award, where the prize is being first in line to supply interior decorating components for the most prestigious shops in the world.
If you guessed “They are all luxury brands” you would of course be right, but you’d be missing another important piece of information: They are all owned by the same group. The Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group – in daily speech LVMH – is the world’s largest group of Luxury Brands, and the above is just a fraction of the 75 top-tier houses they own. In 2019, the group generated a revenue of 53.7 billion euros and has a retail network of over 4.910 stores worldwide. …And those stores require an awful lot of power. This is where Danish newcomer Nordic Power Converters has come in and changed the game.
Back in 2013, LVMH took a good, hard look at its carbon footprint and analyzed their emission profile. It showed that 80% of their scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions came from the energy consumption of their stores and that half of that was store lighting.
This was not good news, because a luxury brand shop needs extremely good lighting. Otherwise, it simply does not look like a luxury brand shop. What they needed was to cut energy consumption without losing light quality. And instead of waiting around for somebody to come up with solutions, they took matters into their own hands. LVMH formed the Lighting For Good think tank initiative. Here, more than 25 of the world’s leading luminaire manufacturers collaborate and compete in eco-design innovation.
The goal is simple: Make things look as good as conventional lighting – preferably better – but without the energy consumption and design tradeoffs. Each year, LVMH awards the best products. Of course, this is highly coveted, because winning not only means publicity: It means that the biggest collection of luxury stores in the world will want to use your product for their shops. And since the interior of a luxury shop is typically replaced every 3 to 6 years, that is a lot of business. Enter Nordic Power Converters, whose InviTrack LED drivers won the ‘Best Driver’ award this year by being objectively superior on all technical accounts, eco-design included. They use far less energy, they’re smaller, provide better light, and cut material use by one third.
“We are extremely proud to receive the Lighting For Good Best Driver Award 2020. It’s like the Oscars of the Lighting Industry,” says Founder and CEO Mickey Madsen. “We already know we have a unique product that is technologically superior to every competitor but having the largest luxury chain on the planet give us this award is huge. It means we are also succeeding as a business. And this kicks open the doors to an enormous market.”
Short answer: it’s kind of like a transformer, just much, much more complex. Unlike old-fashioned light bulbs, LED lights can’t run on the mains power supply. They need something to convert the alternating current coming from the grid into a stable, precise DC low voltage supply, and that’s not an easy task. It’s for example magnitudes harder to make than the unfortunately well-known transformers for halogen lights. Those that are so large, heavy, and ugly that people voluntarily choose to lower their entire ceiling more than necessary just to cover them up. LED lights have the same problem, only they tend to have one per bulb, as opposed to one per rail.
Nordic Power Converters’ LED drivers are fundamentally different from any other LED driver on the market. They have invented and patented a revolutionary high-frequency power conversion technology that enables them to make LED drivers much more efficient, smaller, and more precise with a cleaner output than has ever been seen before. The efficiency alone provides huge environmental savings, and bringing down the material usage by 34% (29% reduction in magnetics and rare-earth materials, 37% in plastics) is exceptional. We could stop right there. But notice the ‘having a cleaner output’ part? That’s a bit more important than one might think: It’s about flicker. And that is ultimately about health.
Have you ever come home with a headache after a day of shopping? That’s probably not only dehydration, it could also be due to the quality of the light you have been in. Aside from being a nuisance, flickering light has been shown to cause fatigue, headache, and a whole range of other unpleasant effects. It was bad with the old light bulbs, and it’s worse with LED. In the luminaire industry, lamp designers have for the last couple of years had the choice between two evils: Put a big, lumpy converter on your product and have a nice light, or be true to the aesthetics and hope the customer doesn’t notice that the light is unpleasant to be in. But no more.
“Our technology has solved this. Making the drivers small enough to hide in the design while removing flicker completely. The InviTrack drivers are the first product that has ever been able to do that – combine miniaturization, efficiency, and removing flicker. No other product comes even remotely close,” states Mickey Madsen proudly.
