Tags: competition, government, led, lighting, prize
As long as there's money involved...
Its always hard to push innovation for the sake of innovation, if there’s no immediate need or immediate benefit from it. Its kind of like procrastinating from doing that term paper since it’s not due until the end of the year. The later you start on it, the less time you have though, to make it good. So along the same line of the X-Prize, the Department of Energy has sponsored the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L-Prize for short) to try to kick the asses of the industry to create something amazing while there’s still time before the “end of the semester”.
The contest is to see who can make a 10-watt replacement for the 60-watt incandescent bulb. The contest was introduced last May, and requires that the lights last 25,000 hours (at 4 hours a day, that’s 17 years!) That’s actually not too difficult, as our LED floodlight bulbs are almost at that 60W mark. The “deal-breaker” as far one of the guidelines go, is that the price should go down to $8 a bulb by the third year of production. Now that’s probably the biggest hurdle. Like any emerging technology, the earlier designs, before they become mainstream, are going to cost a considerable amount more. But then it becomes a Catch-22. We can produce the bulbs for a lot less once people start buying more, but we people won’t start buying more until we can produce them for less. Something here has to give for the wheels to start turning, and hopefully the straw that will break the camel’s back will the want for innovation, rather than the need because we have no choice.
The DOE says that if every household in the U.S. switched all their bulbs to LEDs, you could save enough energy in a year to power everything in Las Vegas for two full years. That’s a lot of incentive in terms of energy saved. If you look at any large-sized company, there is a ton of space that is used as their working environment, and to light up something like that, you must be able to see the cost benefits of switching to eneergy efficient lighting. Well, hopefully this prize can be handed out sooner than later, because time is slowly ticking away….
[Via NY Times and L Prize]
Is there a floor lamp available for the home that uses LEDs ?
Subra: The one that we’ve seen work is the one by Koncept: http://www.konceptech.com/itower.html. They use a strip of LED’s and because of the form factor - it’s HIGHLY adjustable and super sleek.
All the bulbs at eternaleds.com use the same screw-in socket that regular light bulbs use. So you could buy a lamp from Wal-mart or Ikea, and install the light into it. I would recommend the HP-10 globe if this is something you’re really interested in.
I’ve only been aware of the Automotive X Prize. Thanks for this update. I’ll check it out and inform my readers about this via blog.1stoplighting.com.
Thanks for stopping by Akemi!