LED Lighting Advances

Semiconductor-based LEDs use much less power than traditional bulbs, don't contain mercury like fluorescents, and they last for years, sometimes even decades. Recent years have seen very exciting developments in this area, with Orlando, Ann Arbor, Detroit and Taiwan announcing switches of traffic lights to LEDs. This year's Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in New York will even be lit with the technology -- strung along 5 miles of wire!

Philips Lighting

The Singapore facility, which opened in 2007 with 150 employees, will employ 900 people when it reaches full capacity. The company plans to increase the amount of solid-state lighting products it creates as part of an overall goal to help reduce electricity use and associated greenhouse gas emissions.

Advances in lighting technology have increased in scale and scope lately, as the world takes action on climate change. Last month, General Electric announced that it would close its incandescent facilities as it planned to stop making energy-intensive incandescent lightbulbs in favor of compact fluorescent and LED products.

And governments large and small have been passing bans on incandescent lightbulbs in recent months, including China's 10-year plan and Ontario's five-year plan to ban incandescent bulbs. Several U.S. states and U.S. senators and representatives have introduced legislation ban incandescents domestically.

LED Lighting Fixtures

CEO Neal Hunter told the Raleigh News and Observer that his company is developing a lamp that uses less energy than its current LED fixtures but emits the same amount of light. He said a just-released federal study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology confirms that the product is the most efficient in the world. It uses 5.8 watts of power, compared with 60 watts for an equally bright incandescent bulb.

According to the National Institute report, the new fixture uses less than 9 percent of the energy consumed by common bulbs and less than 30 percent of that consumed by fluorescent lights. LLF's best existing product consumes 15 percent of the energy used by an incandescent bulb and 50 percent of that used by fluorescents.

Hunter said he hopes to debut the brighter and more efficient lamps by the end of 2008. The first buyers will likely be wholesale distributors, followed by consumers off store shelves by 2009.