It is clear that legislated use of CFL's is just more Washington pork barrel so "green" friends can collect rents from consumers.
Incandescent bulbs are about 5% efficient, CFL's are maybe 20% efficient and silicon based solid state lighting is >90% efficient and is the future:
groupivsemi.com
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groupivsemi.com
What Silicon Brings to Solid-state Lighting
The incandescent light bulb has changed very little since it was first invented more than 100 years ago. It hasn’t grown much more efficient over the years, yet it’s used today in some 4.4 billion of North America’s 7 billion fixtures—in large part because the challenge of developing an inexpensive energy-saving alternative has proved exceedingly difficult. While compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) have caught on lately with their promise of energy savings, they’re still only about 20 to 25 percent efficient.
Lamps that use solid-state lighting (SSL) technology, by comparison, can achieve much higher efficiency. Unfortunately, up to now they have been too expensive to mass produce.
The goal of Group IV's silicon-based technology is to dramatically reduce the cost of solid-state lighting—overcoming the critical price barrier and enabling widespread adoption.
The Scoop on SSL Technology
In solid-state lamps, semiconductors such as LEDs (light-emitting diodes) convert electricity directly into light without having to activate a gas (as in fluorescents) or heat a filament (as in incandescent bulbs). This conserves a great deal of energy. SSL lamps also last far longer than conventional lamps. But LEDs have not achieved the brightness levels people are accustomed to with conventional lights, and the compound semiconductor materials on which LEDs are based remain stubbornly expensive to manufacture.
Silicon has proved its versatility and cost-effectiveness time and again in semiconductors used for computing, mobile communications and other areas of technology. Group IV is working rapidly to put those advantages to use in a solid-state light engine that will enable the creation of a new generation of solid-state lamps that are at once bright, efficient and inexpensive. These silicon-based SSL products will be designed for use with today’s standard bulb-and-socket fixtures, making them open to rapid adoption by end-users.
Who’s Going to Buy Solid-state Lighting—and Why?
Consumers and corporations alike are feeling the crunch of rising energy costs. Conservation—of electricity, for example—makes sense in principle, but it’s tough to put into practice when homes, businesses and public spaces are increasingly dependent on electronic systems and devices.
Solid-state lighting represents an opportunity to cut back significantly on energy consumption and its associated costs—without having to reduce society’s reliance on that most basic electrical commodity: light.
A powerfully bright idea
Some $12 billion is spent globally every year on lamps for general illumination. Yet conventional lighting technologies are grossly inefficient. More than 90 percent of the energy used by incandescent lamps ends up producing waste heat. Compact fluorescent lamps still waste some 75% of the electricity they use as heat. All that waste devours resources and contributes to the production of carbon emissions.
Remarkably efficient and versatile, solid-state lighting could save some 860 TWh of electricity per year and eliminate 200 million tons of annual carbon emissions worldwide. These are huge numbers—and they’re tied directly to cost savings for consumers and businesses, the engines of our economies. That makes for an undeniably compelling business case. |
