Gabe Arnold joins us from the Pacific Northwest National Labs after his recent work in DC lighting and PoE systems. But before we can that get to that we had to bring up his past at the DesignLights Consortium in the early days of the qualified products list, he explains why utilities needed the DLC’s help, where lighting dorks missed out on their rationale and some hindsight about the rush for high lumens for few watts.

But when it comes to DC power, it’s not going to replace the grid, but as we add more solar panels and energy storage it will become more common to see some systems on run on Direct Current just to avoid adding more inverters than we need. We suspect this will really take off once LiFi gets added to the ix as well, but even Gabe, tech prophet that is, won’t guarantee that one.