Fluorescents Are So Over

September 7, 2007, 6:24 pm
Fluorescents Are So Over
By Barnaby J. Feder
It’s been a notable couple of weeks for solid state lighting.

At the end of last month, Royal Philips Electronics completed a $791 million acquisition of Color Kinetics, the leader in computer-controlled advertising and entertainment displays fashioned out of arrays of light-emitting diodes. Coming just two years after Philips took full control of Lumileds, the Hewlett Packard spin-off that pioneered many of today’s L.E.D. applications, the Color Kinetics deal solidified the Dutch company’s leadership position in high-powered L.E.D. applications. It will be intriguing to see what Philips does with it.


Cree XLamp 7090 XR Series LEDBut a very different type of announcement today might be, forgive us, more illuminating. One of Philips’ major component suppliers, Cree, issued a press release from its headquarters in Durham, N.C., claiming it had designed a light-emitting chip that could power an L.E.D. bulb producing light comparable to the 75-watt incandescent bulbs so common in American homes. If past product development trends are any guide, Philips or some other Cree customer could have a finished product for sale within two years, according to John Edmond, Cree’s director of advanced optoelectronics.


“There’s not anything so far out about this that it won’t go into production,” Mr. Edmond said.

The home will be the last major frontier in solid state lighting’s conquest of incandescent light, the energy hog it has already largely replaced in traffic signals and many other public lighting applications. Solid state lights can do a better job than the current energy-saving alternative, fluorescents, at matching the warm hues consumers are used to from incandescents.

They also last far longer, consume less energy and not require the use of mercury, a toxic component of fluorescents that raises disposal issues.

The sticking point may be the cost — no one knows what the price will be but it will undoubtedly be higher than fluorescents for many years. Incandescents will still look like the best deal to many consumers.

There’s no Moore’s law operating here to rapidly change the cost-to-performance equation — getting a chip to make photons instead of heat out of electrical current and then shepherding most of the photons out of the chip is a far tougher job than the Intels of the world face. But Mr. Edmond forecasts that solid state lighting will eventually get to the finish line of consumer acceptance.

“This is what’s going to replace the light bulb in the home,” he said.

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23 Comments
1. September 7, 2007
11:53 pm

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Are these chips actually more efficient than fluorescent? Last time I looked into the matter, white LEDs were about 10%, while fluorescents were 20% efficient. And fluorescents can be made in warm colors too. So the competitiion is on.

— Mark Troll

2. September 8, 2007
8:38 am

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This is wonderful. I’ve been working with led’s in the aerospace industry for around 10 yrs or so. Once they make it into homes, they’ll make cf’s look like energy hogs.

— nm

3. September 8, 2007
1:27 pm

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the latest research that I read claims that average LED output is only 20 lumens/watt compared to CFLs at 60 lumens/watt. Is that likely to change in consumer products in the near future?

— R Higgin

4. September 8, 2007
4:15 pm

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>>Solid state lights can do a better job than the current energy-saving alternative, fluorescents

Is this really a given conclusion in all circumstances? In my experience, the larger the LED in lumens the more uncomfortably close they come to the same energy use as good quality compact fuorescents. The biggest LEDs still waste energy as heat and need heatsinks. Can they work 24/7 without diminshed life? Mercury is mentioned as hazardous waste, but the amount in a compact fluorescent need be no more than pinpoint drop size, just enought to evaporate in the sealed tube to fill it with mercury vapor, which is part of the mechanism how fluorescents work. And yes, there is cost. Something tells me that all three forms of lighting will fill a niche for some time to come, industry promises notwithstanding. Remember it took 50+ years before we had decent, regular, large, hang-on-the-wall, flat screen televisions from the time Popular Science first trumpeted the notion in the early 1950’s.

— Yacko

5. September 9, 2007
6:53 am

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Can I get one installed in my refrigerator, like, today? That bulb in there is throwing a lot of heat!

— TomG

6. September 9, 2007
10:36 am

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Kudos to Philips for coming with LED-solid lighting solution.

— JOTHI NARAYANAN

7. September 9, 2007
10:59 am

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It seems to me this is s question of maturity of enginering. For instance everybody agrees that the internal combustion engine is a terrible way to extract the energy out of gas and turn it into work. But the fantastic, eficent and reliable engines that we have today ate sitting on a mountain of almost 100 years of engenering refinement. The current LED bulb is the Model T of its time. They will get much better in every way, efficency, reliability, recycle-ability and price.

— Howard

8. September 9, 2007
1:05 pm

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Completely False: “There’s no Moore’s law operating here to rapidly change the cost-to-performance equation.”
Haitz Law shows that the brightness per watt increase by a factor of 10 per decade since 1968 and the cost per lumen drops by a factor of 20 per decade.

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v1/n1/fig_tab/nphoton.2006.44_F1.html

— Joel

9. September 9, 2007
9:05 pm

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Fluorescents Are So Over, Barnaby J. Feder, September 10, 2007

Politely put, Mr. Feder’s article is rubbish.
Mr. Feder, never an expert at long division, forgot his calculator.
We adopted compact fluorescent lamps in 1974.
For the last five years, we got them at Home Deport for $0.002 per lumen or less.
As a specialty product, white LED lamps are about $0.200 per lumen.
Once they overcome a 100:1 cost disadvantage, we’ll be happy to use white LEDs.
In the meantime, you might want to review Mr. Feder’s employment contract.

— Craig Bolon

10. September 9, 2007
11:42 pm

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Politely put, Craig Bolon didn’t read Mr. Feder’s article very carefully.
Mr. Feder didn’t say there was currently a cost benefit to LED over CFL.
He said LED does a better job of matching incandescent’s warm hues. They also last longer and consume less energy than incandescents or CFLs.
Mr. Feder explicitly said that LEDs are more expensive than CFLs: “The sticking point may be the cost — no one knows what the price will be but it will undoubtedly be higher than fluorescents for many years. Incandescents will still look like the best deal to many consumers.”
His headline was meant to be provacative. It did its job in attracting both my and Mr. Bolon’s attention.

— Glenn Harvey

11. September 10, 2007
1:28 am

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TomG, the light in your refrigerator goes off when the door is closed…

— janet

12. September 10, 2007
9:49 am

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Janet, don’t be so sure- GE makes both light refrigerators AND light bulbs…

— Ed B

13. September 10, 2007
10:00 am

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janet,

How do you know?

— Jim G

14. September 10, 2007
11:51 am

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For the people wondering about the current relative efficiency of LED to CFL to incandescent, see http://www.netl.doe.gov/ssl/PDFs/energyEfficiency_oct25_06.pdf which contains a table as well as other interesting information. A couple of excerpts:

“DOE’s long-term research and development goal calls for white-light LEDs producing 160 lm/W in cost-effective, market-ready systems by 2025.”

As of Oct. 2006:
Incandescent 10-18
Linear flourescent 50-100
CFL 35-60
Cool white LED 45-59
Warm white LED (what we most want) 22-37

One other resource that appeared reputable to me was: http://lighting.sandia.gov/XlightingoverviewFAQ.htm

— Mike L.ippert

15. September 10, 2007
1:26 pm

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To: R Higgin, Yacko and Mark the Troll

From Cree’s press release: “Efficacy of the cool-white LED was 72 lumens per watt”. They have, according to a previous press release, also already demonstrated “131 lumens per watt white LED efficacy”.

IMHO, the point of this article is to highlight that LEDs are getting better and will find their way into residential lighting applications. Please don’t make arguments based on stale data.

— Bagel T Banana

16. September 10, 2007
2:04 pm

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People, people. I just checked! I closed the refrigerator door, and the light is still on! GE is da bomb. (I am writing this on shelf two, next to the cottage cheese.)

— ken

17. September 11, 2007
11:05 am

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A little follow-on to Glenn’s comment that “His headline was meant to be provocative.” Actually, it wasn’t my headline but one of the blog editors (I’m not sure which one). Bloggers here get to suggest a headline but in my experience it usually isn’t used. In this case, I committed the cardinal sin of proposing a pun: “L.E.D. There Be Light.”

— Barnaby Feder

18. September 26, 2007
10:18 am

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Both Cree and Lumileds have recently introduced white LEDs providing 90-95 lumens per watt, which enable lighting fixture manufacturers to offer LED fixtures with higher efficiency than compact fluorescents. These LEDS are likely to be initially used in commercial-grade lighting fixtures, but it’s only a matter of time before they become available to the consumer market.

— Keith Bahde

19. October 2, 2007
3:14 pm

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How do you email Mr. Feder? Is he aware of all the innaccuracies in this article? I am as excited for LED as the next guy… but it will be quite some time before it replaces fluorescents in most applications, if ever in some applications. The NY Times should have higher standards for printing accurate information.

Now my organization will spend the next couple years lowering expectations of the people who have read this article!

— Gabe Arnold, PE, LC, CEM

20. October 21, 2007
10:01 pm

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The post by Mr. Arnold, PE, LC, CEM is totally misinformed and not Mr. Feder. When Mr. Arnold uses our lights in his home, he will no doubt; “SEE THE LIGHT.” :-) Amen!

— Dr. David Deak

21. November 13, 2007
10:18 am

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White LED’s have indeed finally overtaken cfl’s in efficiency (see http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v1/n1/full/nphoton.2006.44.html, and all the other sources mentioned by others).
Given their zero mercury content and long life (durability–less waste–being a key ‘green’ procurement standard), they should be the preferred option for every use they are adapted to suit from today on.
the only question is getting them suited to the various needs out there. As a consultant to a green event and show producer, I was encouraged when I learned that LED spot and flood lights are now available, and from more than one source
it is worth pressing your vendor/distributor for LED solutions to your lighting needs-this is what will push the industry into higher gear, getting us even more lumens per watt with each new product.

— brendan

22. April 27, 2008
7:47 pm

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Update! The light in the fridge does appear to stay on, based on my miniaturizing myself and crawling into the fridge. (BTW, something is rotten in here). However, it turns out that when you miniaturize the human body (and therefore the retina) your eyes become much more sensitive to infrared radiation. The element of the light bulb being much warmer than the fridge even after turning off, appeared bright to my miniature retinas.

Sorry, the light really does turn off after all.

— JB

23. June 9, 2008
3:11 pm

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Well, hurry up LEDs because as you may or may not know, in December of 2007 Congress passed legislation that will phase out the incandescent by the end of 2014. See -http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59298

Bushwaq’d again.

— Stephen