The Future’s Bright, The Future’s LED
Why the buzz about LED lighting?
LED Lighting was until quite recently a little known backwater in the field of domestic/commercial lighting solutions with few practical applications and few fans. Well that was then. This is now.
The stark reality now is that oil is running out fast which is going to result in HUGE increases in the cost of energy.
That’s because
- at present almost all our energy comes from oil, and
- the law of supply and demand is still on the statute book.
Sound’s grim? Well that depends on whether you buy into the “we’re all doomed, woe is us” mentality that assumes we brought all this on ourselves (which, to be fair, we did) and now must pay a terrible price (literally and metaphorically).
An alternative school of thought suggests that actually mankind has a pretty good record of applying its collective ingenuity to solve most problems, even great big ones that we in fact created.
And that’s why LED lighting is fast becoming one of the hottest emerging technologies around and one of the coolest domestic/commercial lighting solutions available.
It’s economics…..
The difference between conventional incandescent / halogen lamps and solid-state lighting such LEDs is truly orders of magnitude. The former is little more than a heat source that also releases a very small percentage of incidental light; in terms of light production it’s little different to the gas lamp or candle even.
Whereas LEDs are electronic devices that convert their tiny power input into pure light and very little else.
And that’s the point.
They cost almost nothing to run (and can be easily powered by solar power and other renewable energy sources), don’t wreck the environment, look fantastic and go on quietly doing this for decades.
The very low power consumption characteristics of LED lights combined with their longevity makes them very attractive to consumers in terms of total cost of ownership.
In a world of ever rising fuel costs the payback from moving to LED lighting can be as little as a year or two with ongoing reductions in electricity bills thereafter.
But it’s not just your personal carbon footprint that’s improved by running low-cost, low-heat, low-replacement lighting.
The energy required to power wasteful incandescent lamps, that throw up to 98% of that energy away as heat, comes from electricity generating power stations that themselves pump waste heat AND carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And that’s all before you factor in the energy (and therefore ever more expensive fuel and environmental damage) required to keep making all the replacement incandescent / halogen bulbs you will need to continue illuminating your home or business.
A regular 60w incandescent light bulb has a life of little more than 1,000 hours which means you will have to purchase a whopping 50 replacements over the same lifetime as an LED equivalent, if we said the LED only had a lifetime of 50,000 hours. In truth, with the proper installation and conditions, they can last up to 100,000 hours!
Multiplied by billions of people, that’s cost, waste and pollution on a truly heroic scale.
The writing is on the wall……
Many in the lighting industry see the present generation of “low-energy” CFL light bulbs as merely an interim solution prior to widespread adoption of LED technology.
CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) are, as the name suggests, simply small fluorescent tubes (not unlike the neon strip lights you see in offices) and are noted for their large ungainly appearance, inability to be dimmed, unpleasant light quality and 5 milligrams of mercury in each one that render them hazardous waste.
This is what Kaj den Daas, chairman and chief executive of Philips Lighting, has to say about CFLs: “We are not spending one dollar on research and development for compact fluorescents”.
That’s because Philips R&D budget is being spent on next generation LED lights to meet the coming demand for low-energy, low-environmental impact products that will be driven by the twin tsunamis of climate change and the energy crunch.
Matt Adams (also of Philips Lighting) gives an intriguing glimpse of what we might expect from LED lighting in the near future.
‘When an entire established industry changes it’s business model, from making money selling a low-cost item that has to be frequently replaced to selling a higher priced item that lasts decades, you just know that the world is about to experience one of those seismic shifts that are so easy to identify in history and yet so easy to miss when they actually happen.’
Think the internet, powered flight, telephones, electricity itself. That scale of shift that changes the world forever, as all the while the know-alls, critics and other assorted Jeremiahs explain why it won’t work and can’t happen. The future of lighting is LED because the future has to be low-energy, low-carbon, low-heat; otherwise there is no future. That’s just the way it is, so get used to it and welcome to the bright new world of home LED lighting!
The Costs And Savings Of Switching To LED
Why the more expensive purchase actually costs less
There is no question that the purchase price of LED lamps is significantly higher than that of either CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamp) or conventional Tungsten or GSL (General Service Lamp) counterparts.
But the purchase price is not the full story. The cost of anything, light bulbs included, is what it costs to both buy AND use. What is known as Total Cost of Ownership.
A regular incandescent 100w GSL light bulb lasts about 1,000 hours and costs roughly $1.
An equivalent 10w LED lamp lasts 50,000 hours and costs say $100 (in reality, rather less than that these days and getting cheaper all the time).
Doing the math
For the exercise let’s say the accepted standard rate of electricity is 10 cents per kilowatt hour and our comparison will be over the lifetime of our LED lamp.
Our GSL rated at 100w thus costs you $500 worth of electricity over 50,000 hours and has to be replaced 50 times, giving a total cost of ownership of $550.
Our LED rated at 10w costs $65 over the same period and does not have to be replaced at all, giving a total cost of ownership (purchase + running costs) of $165.
The LED actually costs less to run throughout its entire life than it costs to buy! This is simply unheard of in a light bulb - before now. And with purchase prices for LEDs dropping (as always occurs with any new technology as it becomes commonplace) the LED holds out a promise of extraordinarily low cost lighting.
The bottom line is that the “cheap” bulb is in real money terms $385 more expensive for you to own! And that’s just ONE BULB! Assuming 8 hours use per day, the payback time (the point at which you will have recovered all the initial cost difference between the two options) is just under 3 years and it will actually save you money for the next 14 years after that. (You can do the same exercise with a 50w halogen).
This estimate is also being extremely generous to the incandescent lamp, since it has not accounted for increases in the price of either electricity or replacement bulbs, nor has it allowed for the fact that LED lighting is in fact getting cheaper by the day..
An example…
For a fairly standard family household or business layout that uses banks of halogen down lighters (mixed mains and low voltage) (say 40-50 individual lamps in total) replacing these with LED lighting would save well over $10,000 easily.
Interestingly, the net saving is relatively unaffected by the amount of daily use for lighting. If you have your lighting on less (say 4 hours per day) then the payback period is longer, but so also is the total period of saving. If you increase to say 12 hours a day then the payback will tend be little more than one year but the savings are spread over a much shorter period which actually increases your annual savings.
So $10,000 over ten years obviously puts $1,000 dollars back into your pocket each year whereas over thirty five years (the lifetime of an LED used 4 hours per day) the total saving remains about the same but each annual saving is only about $286.
Of course, this is only looking at replacing halogen spot lights throughout your home or business. There are many other areas where LED lighting can be used to either replace or augment your existing lighting.
Article by kulekat 