The innovation of LED lighting illuminates the future

LED lights have been around since the 1960s, but it was not until the invention of the blue LED in the 1990s that white LED bulbs were manufactured. Since then, it has become the dominant technology in many markets to compete with traditional light bulbs due to its steadily declining price.

In global residential sales, LED has also surpassed fluorescent lamps in 2018, reaching a market share of 40%. Today, an LED bulb may retail for US$2 to US$5 in many countries, and the price is even lower in some areas. For example, in India, the government successfully promoted the adoption of LED lighting by reducing taxes and duties on local manufacturers.

Compared with incandescent bulbs, LEDs have many advantages: they use much longer, generate less heat, consume less power, and thus reduce life-span costs, and their lower power consumption makes them more environmentally friendly. LEDs also use less power than most fluorescent lamps and have the advantage of reaching full brightness immediately when they are turned on.

Lighting accounts for a large part of global electricity consumption, which is estimated by the European Commission to be about 15%. In the United States, residential and industrial/commercial lighting uses 7% of total energy (not just electricity).

With the advent of the climate crisis, we need to reduce the electricity consumption of lighting-and we need to cut it drastically so that the countries that signed the Paris Agreement can achieve their greenhouse gas reduction targets.

LEDs can help achieve this: residential LED lights usually provide lighting energy efficiency (lm/W) of more than 90 lumens per watt they consume, and suppliers claim that some new models are 200 lm/W or more. In contrast, traditional light bulbs may reach 15 lm/W, halogen lamps 25 lm/W, and "energy-saving" fluorescent lamps are usually around 55-60 lm/W.

For enterprises, the light source of choice is usually fluorescent lamps, with a relative energy efficiency of about 100 lm/W. But the quality of the light it produces is dazzling, and the warmer light produced by LEDs is usually the first choice for most people-newer LEDs provide the same amount of light with half the electricity of fluorescent lamps, which is a win-win situation.

Lower power consumption also creates new opportunities to make possible electric lights that were not available before-especially solar-powered electric lights without a main grid. For example, between 2010 and 2017, 130 million solar lights were deployed, mainly in Africa and Asia. There is clean and safe lighting after sunset, which can greatly improve people's quality of life and children can study at home.

Government regulations have accelerated the switch to LEDs in certain areas. For example, in the European Union, there is a minimum energy efficiency standard for LED lamps, and other lamps with lower energy efficiency are no longer allowed to be sold.