LightFair, the annual lighting and illumination confab, takes place in New York this week and the announcements are rolling in.

Luminus Devices, the well-funded MIT spin-out, released the CSM-360 today, an LED with a 6,000 lumen output that covers 9 square millimeters. It also released an LED-in-a-package that covers five square millimeters. For LEDs, this is a  large part of the company's strategy. By manufacturing large LEDs, light fixture makers can reduce the number of components required for a fixture. Earlier this year, Bridgelux showed how it can put several LED under a single lens to make a cheaper LED bulb.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy released an application, called Commercial Lighting Solutions, that can help engineers design rooms and systems to reduce power consumption attributed to lights by 30 percent.

Expect to hear a lot of annoucements at the show from General Electric, Osram, Philips and others about moving LEDs to the mainstream. The lights last far longer than conventional bulbs and don't contain toxic chemicals like mercury. They are also finally coming down in price. Although LEDs won't likely start popping up on Home Depot shelves in large numbers until 2011 or 2012, commercial building owners and restaurants are expected to start adopting them more.

Also look for annoucements on plasma lights from Eden Park Illumination.

Lighting was once a fairly obscure corner of the greentech world, but it's growing. Lights consume 22 percent of the electrical power in the U.S. Worse, many lights are old and inefficient – the incandescent was invented in 1879 and the florescent dates back to 1911 – and most aren't networked to save power.