This is real simple math, even if you have been curled up with that remote control for the last 40 years and are a little groggy from when you nodded off when the Star Spangled Banner was ceding to the Test Pattern (remember when we had more channels than programming.. those were the days.). LED's are 5 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and twice as efficient as Compact Florescent, the ol pigtails that were the last green wave. but to make it even better.. they last longer than both.. more than twice as long as the CFL, and as much as 25 (!) times as long as the Incandescent.
http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/lighting-choices-save-you-money
They can get hot, but not as hot as the Incandescent, which looses 90% of the power that goes through it to heat.. Once that was the big jump, from natural gas and fire.. in the times of Edison, when the first grid and streetlights were made in lower Manhattan, when the world ceased to be lit only by fire. That heat went somewhere, and it's fair to say that for instance most of America needs heating sometimes.. but nowhere in America seems to need it all the time.. and think of the tropics.. it's hot enough without that 100 year old technology blazing away when you have the soda coolers going too in the village general store. The heat is waste, and LED's might not have it licked completely, sometimes a large part of the bulb is a heat dissipator, but we are now in generation 3 of common electric lighting technology (Sorry Halogen and Halide!) and the savings are starting to come in, as well as the non financial dividends.
There have been challenges. For one thing, these LED's are so space age looking that the light was kind of unnatural. After either 5000 or 2 million years adapted to fire (depending upon who you talk to) we have a hard time giving up on something that is almost hard wired no matter how inefficient. It's a question of what is called Light Temperature.. comparison to what I think the sun would produce as light quality at different temperatures. The Light of the sun gives us about 5000 kelvin, but that odd green light of old tubular fluorescent is 1500K, the kind you see burning in weird self help meetings in Fight Club. LED could be set at different temps and colors by the gap between the receptors I believe, perhaps oversimplifying, but it was a challenge nonetheless.
Somehow appreciating that, the hot shots at DOE made an X prize, the world's new solution to intractable scientific problems. The Prize, 10 million smacks, would go to the company or organization that made the light that looked the most like, yup, an incandescent. We gave 10 Million Taxpayer dollars to the research entity who could best bend the future of lighting back to our past of fire..
http://www.lightingprize.org/
it may seem, well, a bit, a bit like a dim bulbed idea (couldn't resist) but the DoE under the late days of the Bush administration and then Obama's Nobel Prize winning professor turned Secretary Stephen Chu (luckily his boss got one soon after his appointment so it didn't throw off cabinet meeting dynamics) there was a burning, not just light emitting, desire to get the country en mass to adopt this new technology, since a vast majority of our electric energy was and still is produced by Fossil Fuels with their attendant Climate Issues, and even so called clean sources like dam's have issues, and since lighting accounts for some 20ish % of all US electric use across commercial and residential demand, and perhaps a bit lower in Industrial (and likely a greater proportion of world demand). If you can cut demand by 50% or 80%, you just chopped global warming emissions and a boat load of other issues by a sizable percentage, maybe 10% barring growth in demand if everyone switched over..
Unfortunately, there is this phenomenon.. when we save, we take a bit more. I have two good friends who work in big carbon saving industries, one is large scale solar installing, and one in Forestry, and they both seem to fly a heck of a lot more than anyone I know. We see our highest use as the base line, and we tend to use more when we save. I drive more now that I have a hybrid, because I feel a bit liberated by it, a bit less guilty. There have been similar effects in LED's.. they are cool, not just physically, but cool looking. I will reference the Santa Monica Ferris Wheel. Since the pier was rebuilt and reopened as a fun park again after years of destruction and neglect familiar to Fletch fans, in 1995 it has been solar powered in some way or form, so it has a good legacy of eco-Karma, but when they rebuilt it in 2008, they, yup, added 160,000 LED's. it's pretty cool.. you an see it all the way down to Palos Verdes and up to the end of Malibu if there is no fog.
They are computer controlled and seem to never repeat the same patter twice. It somehow has come hand in hand with a new art style, which is heavy with LED's. A few years back I was bumming around Dog Town and was invited to join a crew at the beach around the pie for a light festival.. almost every instalation had one thing in common.. LED's.
http://glowsantamonica.org/
but keep going back with this.. Glow Santa Monica seemed to be to be an outgrowth of Burning Man, along with things like Coachella, and Burning Man's using LED's seemed to come from the rave scene using glow sticks and LED's from Ibiza to South Beach, and this brings us all the way back to the joint ideas of electronics and mood lighting.. and all this seems like almost a dividend of the investment in more efficient energy.. so even if we are perhaps taking back a bit of the savings for fun, all work and no play can make jack a dull boy.
A latest outgrowth seems to be in Automobiles. When I was a kid, headlights, the eyes of the car, seemed kind of dull.. a bit impassively sinister as Steven King deduced.. in the 90's halogens came out, and night driving started to seem like a Swedish safety innovation, coolly intense:
but the eyes were beady, no matter how many plastic angles they put in there to change it up. the new trend, so expensive that is has been filtering down from the super car Audi's of the world is to give these car's LED eyebrows, and in some cases, LED headlights, as has been an innovation of the off road world and the aviation community:
But these are all on the fringes of the big usage.. the eggheads and the hippies in Californ-I-A don't for a world change make, and ol Henry Chu knows that.. if the world is gonna really change back to the clean skies when 'those were the days', Archie Bunker himself needs to buy in and not see this as a socialist Obamaplot to change radio frequencies to make him infertile.. it needs to work for Joe Sixpack and Joe the Plumber, notoriously risk averse in the agriculture based societies of what are now known as "the red states" to contrast them from the allegedly more risk taking partying under the crystal glow city boys in those coastal areas with less to loose.
Is that happening?
Well, a bit.. the logic seems to be appealing, and more importantly, the price is coming down. I did some field research in a little place called Home Depot in a city called Ft. Wayne Indiana.. fascinating place.. people actually shop there (I kid) and I had a conversation with the display manager while I picked up a grill/smoker that would single handedly double global warming's impact ( I must deserve it somehow!). This was in the summer of 2014, and things were happening quick, and I had been watching it, because all summer I had been in one of Home Depot's competitors almost weekly.. a place known as Loews, and I had seen the increasing number of options arrive, even in weeks. I asked him what was going on, and he said he wasn't sure the price had bottomed out yet, but that there were so many new products coming out that he had to change the display almost every other week to accommodate the new variants in light temperature, intensity, and socket size. There was beginning to be competition even in obscure bulbs, like driveway lights and weird fittings that go under counters and porches.. some of the challenges remained.. bright ones were way expensive and the price went up directly relative to how many LED's were in the bulb, unlike with CFL's and incandescents where the bulb held it's price and you just added a bit more or less filament or material to make it brighter or darker, yellower or whiter. But if you played with them, you found that something marked 40 w equivalent seemed to be as bright as a 100 watt bulb in the same place, and that it took experimentation to get it right, and that experimentation often lead to buying less expensive options that did work as well. And there were improvements in quality. A daylight bulb would flood a space with such a brilliant light that it felt like a museum space, and the walls would pop and the wood grain jump out at you.. it started to feel like a pleasure to do laundry (not that I do laundry.. I am never in any one place long enough to do more than just buy new clothes and burn the dirty ones in buckets of crude oil.. hey, I write about the environment, I earned it!). There are so many companies making LED's now, from car accessories and airplane parts to city lighting as I discussed in my Dark Sky Movement Piece that the price has been coming down, but it's fair to say that it can't come down to where Incandescents are because there is so much more material there, it's more complex, but I have seen them in end cap displays (it makes me cringe that I know commercial lingo...) well under 10 American dollars. And they might last 30 years.
People just have to do the math, and many are doing it.. for one thing, they Gub'ment acted.. they banned incandescents a few years ago.. people hoarded them like they are hoardin' 22 ammo today... although you can still find vintage bulbs, so they exist on the shelves if you look. I don't like being told what to do any more than you do, but they acted, kind of. The administration trying to drive coal out of business (yes they are trying to do it, and it might be a good thing) seems to have made the price of electricity go up, as have high energy prices in general due to instability in places like the middle east and maybe some unseen hand of cartelling that even the best minds at the Wall Street Journal can't seem to find. It has helped the math even as we do domesticate more and more of our energy demand with the huge fields opened in the first part of this decade in places like Utah and North Dakota. And even as it goes down, all seem to agree the weather is wackier and wackier, and that impression is filtering in.
Now how long will it be before this all has to happen again? there are likely plenty of farmers who remember installing CFL's in their barns ten years ago, and are wondering when the payback will come.. it took 90 years to get there, and here we are 20 years later doing at it again.. what if the next big thing comes in 10 years, or 5.. well... I can't answer that.. better beats best.. but I think the whole lighting world is so focused on LED's I am not sure what else is out there.. they are making things like the Phillips Hue, that can choose colors of an almost infinite variety and broadcast them from their bulbs.. I still don't know how it works.. it's like a bright color wheel. I wonder what will happen if new TV technologies come over to lighting, and things like the OLED, the organic LED that saves a few extra watts by using biological matter to create colors..
I hate to have to ask the farmer to change his lights again to this, but maybe this is where it's going.. it's flat, and it's expensive, but if you find yourself in a Best Buy (winter is long where I live now.. I used to avoid all big boxes.. now it sounds like I live in them!) you know it looks really cool!
Wherever it goes, we know where it has gone, and it's so much better that given the global crisis occurring (trying not to be a bummer.. keep watching the happy box!) it's hard to not at least advocate that you switch as you go, as things burn out, replace them.. trying to be light about it, but there is a lot riding on it..
About 8 years ago I had the chance to go to two U2 shows.. U2 rerpresents this new kind of melding of art and consumerism.. let's call it LED optimism.. we are just a few consumer choices away from Utopia it implies. I know they used to be punk and raw, back during the troubles and when Dublin was still poor and gritty, but Bono lives on Central Park West now, he's got bills to pay.. the show was great, I can't lie.. even if I don't want them to have a place in my heart because I hear them blasting out of Lexus's of people who then absent mindedly cut me off while checking their texts and stocks, they do, because their music is that good. I was entraced at the shows by these hanging strings of LED's that they had turned into screens.. it was kind of amazing.. what also struck me was at some point during the show, Bono had everyone hold their phones up in the air to text and raise money for some such nonsense like ending world hunger (sheesh.. get to the hits if you have any!) and I was amazed.. when I was a kid, it would have been lighters. but here it was, yuppie power, and it was strangely beautiful.. I wrote in my 787 piece about how the Republican controlled US Congress has stymied every attempt to fight global warming that isn't voluntary or consumer based, so again, this is where we are left.. indulge them but do it while making even more money.. U2 kind of represent this new LED future.. They do huge tours every few years, always epitomized to me by them stopping in Mexico City where they are revered, as kind of Men from the Future, bringing such an extravaganza of light and accessible emotion that you can't help but be a little impressed..
Enjoy it.. remember it costs something, but it costs less in the long run..
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