Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. Department of Energy sponsored a field and bench-scale evaluation of a Power over Ethernet (PoE) direct-current (DC) distribution lighting system at GSA’s Workplace Innovation Lab (WIL) in Washington, DC, with supplemental testing at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Cisco provided the PoE-based DC lighting and controls platform for assessment. The project topic generally examines how DC distribution and combined power-and-data networks can help move commercial buildings from today’s fragmented AC-to-DC device-by-device model toward streamlined DC-centric architectures that enable granular monitoring, flexible IT-style deployment, and intelligent “plug-and-play” integration of lighting, HVAC, security, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices.