So you’ve heard of the industrial revolution, then we had communications with mass media in the form of first national newspapers, followed by radio and television. Then along came the information revolution with miniature computing devices and the internet. So prepare for the next big thing – the light revolution.
Think I’m making this up? Well first of all consider what life would be like without artificial lighting. It wouldn’t just be inconvenient to have to stop most activities as soon as the sun went down, but certain things would be impossible. Driving at night, enclosed shopping malls, underground railways, surgical theaters, the list just goes on. Not to mention the economic cost of only being able to work during daylight hours.
© by Egan Snow
Lighting is hugely important to us. But the technology we have been using to provide it up till now is also damaging our life support system, namely the environment. Incandescent light bulbs are outrageously inefficient (how many other devices do you know of that convert barely ten percent of their input into the desired output). When viewed from a global perspective, this produces a colossal amount of waste heat and consumes vast quantities of energy, neither of which is good for the planet and, by implication, us.
This is sufficiently alarming that already most standard forms of incandescent light bulb have been phased out and the rest are scheduled to be eradicated in the not too distant future. It was expected that “energy saving” compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) would fill the gap, but in fact this opened a window of opportunity for a technology that kicks CFL into the weeds.
I’m talking about the LED light bulb which at the present state of development uses roughly one tenth as much energy as an incandescent bulb in order to produce an equivalent level of light. But that’s not the end of the story by a long way. All other forms of lighting derive light as a byproduct of heating something up (be it a metal filament or contained gas) and there is only so far you can push this.
Light emitting diodes on the other hand emit photons (light particles) directly as a result of changes of to the energy state of electrons in a semiconductor. In other words they are made of the same basic stuff as computer chips and exactly as Moore’s Law accurately describes the astonishing rate of change for computer processors, Haitz’s Law tells us that improvements in LED power will also be exponential.
So expect the power per watt for LED lights to double every eighteen months and the cost to drop by a factor of ten every ten years. Hypothetically this can continue indefinitely but in practice once LEDs get to a power level and price point that most consumers are happy with then development will likely slow, but even at this stage your are looking at reducing the world’s total energy consumption by 20% just by changing its light bulbs.
Truth be told, the light revolution will likely go beyond LED, as exciting new technological developments are brought to the consumer market. As energy efficiency in lighting becomes more and more important, the push for improvements in related technologies will become stronger.
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