Solid State Lighting - Opportunities

ENERGY SAVINGS, LABOR SAVINGS, AND RELIABILITY

Solid state lighting has the potential to dramatically reduce California's electricity consumption - when the technology is fully mature, it will produce seven times as much light as a traditional incandescent bulbs of the same wattage. With lighting representing 22% of home electricity use and 36% of commercial electricity use, this is a huge opportunity.

But the benefits of solid state lighting are not limited to energy savings. With the potential to last 50 to 100 times longer than incandescents, solid state lighting can go 15 or 20 years without requiring bulb replacement. This can be particularly important for hard-to-access commercial and industrial lighting. It is also important for applications like traffic lights, where failure can cause significant disruption.

Additionally, for portable electronics such as laptop computers, the lower power consumption of solid state lighting translates to significantly longer battery life. The long battery life is also a great benefit in applications like flashlights, where long life in an emergency can be of critical importance.

While solid state lighting may still be a novelty today, this is a technology that is rapidly increasing in efficacy and affordability. The light output from an LED has increased by a factor of twenty every decade for the past 40 years, while the cost per unit of light output has decreased ten-fold each decade, a phenomenon referred to as Haitz's Law, after the Hewlett-Packard engineer who first observed the trend. In fact, Philips Lighting, one of the three largest lighting manufacturers in North America, is so convinced of this technology's potential that it anticipates that solid state lighting will account for 20% of the company's professional lighting revenues by 2010.