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When I was a kid I used to love playing in my eccentric Uncle Martin’s basement which was stacked high with lots of tools, gadgets, and technology from the early 1900s. I still smile every time I remember the day he helped me fire up a 1920s-vintage carbon arc light which he’d salvaged out of a theater -- its white-hot glare lit up the basement brighter than daylight. Perhaps some day we’ll have the same nostalgic feelings about the inefficient light bulbs in our homes and the mercury and sodium lamps that light most of our streets today. If the doings in Raleigh, North Carolina and Toronto, Ontario are any indicator, that day may be arriving sooner than expected.

 

Toronto and Raleigh are first two cities to commit to modernizing their lighting technologies in partnership with LEDCity, a community of government and industry stakeholders working to promote and deploy energy-efficient LED lighting technology in the roads, buildings, structures, and public areas of towns and cities. By providing a single point of contact for municipalities, policy makers, manufacturers and technology developers, LEDCity hopes to shorten the time it would normally take for Cities to begin enjoying the economic and environmental benefits of solid-state lighting.

 

Thanks to recent improvements in efficiency (now around 90 Lumen/W*) and their ability to direct all the photons they produce where they are needed, LEDCity has demonstrated that solid-state lighting uses 40% less electricity than most high-efficiency lighting systems commonly used today. The early pilot projects being run in Toronto include deployments on roadways and parking garages as well as parks and pathways in selected parts of the city. This and the larger pilot programs planned for the next 1 - 2 years will pave the way for mass deployment over the next 5 - 10 years. Equally important, the best practices and lessons learned as Toronto greens up its lighting will be shared with all municipalities to accelerate acceptance elsewhere.

 

Municipal applications like this are an important stepping stone in the world’s transition to LED lighting because cities are more aware of operational costs than consumers are. While its initial cost of solid-state fixtures is significantly higher than a high-pressure sodium, mercury vapor or metal halide light, their lower energy consumption and long life (typically 50 k+ hours) still yields considerable savings. This is most apparent in traffic lights where the difference between a $50 conventional bulb and a $250 LED unit is dwarfed by the labor costs of a single replacement cycle. Likewise, street lights, parking garage fixtures, and sidewalk lighting whose service intervals will be measured in decades can put lots of green back in a town’s annual budget while significantly reducing its global carbon footprint.**

 

Besides the tremendous environmental benefits and reduced operating costs, municipal applications will help ramp up demand for LED lighting and start driving it down the cost/volume curve. Besides sheer volume, there are a number of technical challenges that must be overcome before we see commercial and residential HBLED products selling at something close to what premium lighting fixtures cost today. Developing reliable, efficient and cost-effective power supplies that can be counted on for the entire 50,000 - 70,000 hour life of a solid-state lamp is only one of the opportunities for innovation that will help make fortunes for this new generation of high-tech of eco-preneurs. Companies that can deliver new solutions for thermal management, light distribution, and smart lighting control will also be able to cash in on the solid-state tsunami that will soon flood our streets and sidewalks with clean, attractive LED-generated light.

 

Of course, I’ve got my own plan to cash in on the solid-state lighting revolution. I’ve already stashed away a case of incandescent light bulbs in the basement and figure I can sell them as nostalgia items about the time I retire. Of course, that assumes my nieces and nephews don’t find them first when they’re rummaging around other the piles of tools, gadgets, and 20th-century technology I’ve already got down there.

 

Comments? Questions? Other examples of 20th-century tech nostalgia?

 

Write me at lhg at en-genius.net, or post your comments on the blog.