Guest post written by Bill Watkins and Rob Praske.
Bill Watkins is CEO of Bridgelux. Rob Praske is founder and CEO of Anycomm.
Light emitting diodes - semiconductors that emit light - have put light bulbs back on the front page, arguably for the first time since Thomas Edison unveiled his bulb in 1879 to replace for kerosene lamps.
And, just like in Edison’s time, the lighting industry is being forced to wrestle with a number of misconceptions, myths and outright false claims about a product that will change the way we live.
You’ve probably heard them. LEDs cost vast amounts of money. They don’t work. They don’t save power. LEDs are part of a government plot to control your life. If we don’t stop them now, they’ll come after the mini fridge in the garage next!
We’d like to give these myths a rest.
- Myth Number One: LEDs Don’t Save Power.
LED bulbs typically consume less than half of the energy of a compact fluorescent and 1/8th to 1/10th of the power of an incandescent bulb. Those figures for LEDs will also improve over time too. LEDs, after all, are chips: history and physics dictate that they will go down in price and improve in performance steadily over time.
Conventional bulbs are vacuum tubes. They don’t get better. Incandescent bulb, still the most popular bulb with consumers in the U.S., typically only use 10 percent of the power fed into them to create light. The rest gets turned into heat.
You probably don’t own a vacuum tube-powered computer or a CRT TV anymore. Your MP3 player doesn’t weigh 35 pounds because of integrated arrays of switches and relays. So why do you have lots of vacuum tubes stuck in lamps throughout your house?
The inefficiency of traditional bulbs adds up. Consumers and businesses around the world spend over $100 billion on light bulbs and fixtures annually, and over $600 billion to power them. Yet only a small percentage of lights are connected to networks that can dim them to save energy.
Lighting companies have got away with serving up the status quo for over a century in part by convincing people not to think about light. It’s a light bulb, they argue. Just replace them when they burn out.
They don’t bother to mention that it’s an expensive habit. About 23 percent of the electricity in the U.S gets gobbled up by lighting: 18 percent goes to power bulbs and the remaining 4 to 5 percent gets used to run air conditioners to eliminate the waste heat generated by inefficient bulbs. And talk to your janitor: replacing bulbs is still one of the primary tasks for facilities managers everywhere.
- Myth Number Two: LEDs Don’t Work
Actually, car manufacturers, TV makers, street light manufacturers and makers of industrial equipment have already turned to LEDs to reduce power.
These manufacturers, in fact, have chosen LEDs because they fit better with the rough and tumble of everyday reality. Unlike conventional bulbs, LEDs don’t shatter. They also don’t contain gases like mercury or electrodes that can easily snap. An LED bulb will last 35,000 to 50,000 hours, which translates into more than ten years in ordinary household or office scenarios.
- Myth Number Three: It’s Just a Light Bulb
In reality, LEDs are computers. Festival Hydro will soon demonstrate what we’re talking about. The utility will give 100,000 LED bulbs equipped with wireless chips to residential and business customers in Stratford, Ontario with smart meters. Through the smart meters and wireless connections, customers will essentially let Festival Hydro dim their lights during peak periods or off-hours. (Bridgelux will provide the LED technology while Anycomm will provide the software for controlling the system for the pilot.)
Consumers will be able to override the system, but Festival Hydro expects that most of them will stick with the program. Most of the time, consumers likely won’t even notice a difference: studies have shown that lights in office buildings can be dimmed by 40 percent for as long as a half an hour without anyone complaining.
In the end, consumers will experience lower bills, the utility will be able to curb peak power consumption and the maintenance staff won’t have to change bulbs as often.
- Myth Number Four: LEDs Are Too Expensive
Festival Hydro will give its customers LEDs for free. Let’s repeat that. Free, as in no money down ever. The power conserved will pay for the bulbs. (Each bulb will leave the factory already matched to a smart meter, so a black market in free bulbs likely won’t erupt.)
If trials like these succeed, utilities will start giving out millions of free LEDs. The power consumption avoided will let them postpone investing millions into new fossil fuel power plants for years.
Even bulbs in stores that aren’t part of utility programs are already rapidly dropping in price. Several manufacturers sell $20 LED bulbs that put out as much light as a 60-watt incandescent. $20! Yes, but that bulb will shave $10 off your utility bill a year and last until 2025 or longer. You’ll make over $100 in the long run.
- Myth Number Five: It’s a Government Plot
The “black helicopter” myth would have you believe that legislators around the world -Australia, Europe, Canada, the U.S., China, New Zealand, and the Philippines among others - have passed light bulb efficiency laws in the past several years as a favor to lighting manufacturers.
The extensive list of nations alone should be enough to explode the notion of a plot. This is also not the first time governments have issued consumer regulations. Leaded gas got phased out decades ago. Childproof medicine bottles are universal and good luck buying meat that contains a “This was NOT Inspected by the USDA - You’re on your own!” sticker.
Instead, consumers will gravitate toward LEDs because of the untapped capabilities they provide. As LED technology proliferates, customers will experiment with integrating motion sensors into bulbs, turning LEDs into nodes for security systems. Temperature and carbon dioxide sensors can allow bulbs to deliver data to building management systems.
LEDs can also be used to change the atmosphere in the room with the flick of a mouse or help you sleep better. City managers will deploy LED street lights to check traffic conditions and keep a lid on municipal expenses.
With LEDs, the metal benders in the lighting business are starting to discover Moore’s Law.
Skeptics abound. But skeptics nearly always seem to miss inflection points. Cynics back in the 1970s predicted only hobbyists would own home computers. The only person who really needs a cellphone, they argued back in the 80s, was Gordon Gekko. The Internet burst in 2002, they proclaimed, two short years before Facebook.
Maybe the only myth is that the critics are invariably right.
