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DOE Shines $21M on Advanced Lighting Research
coondoggie writes to mention that the US Department of Energy is planning to fork over close to $21 million for 13 projects promising to advance solid-state lighting research and development. "SSL lighting is an advanced technology that creates light with considerably less heat than incandescent and fluorescent lamps, allowing for increased energy efficiency. Unlike incandescent and fluorescent bulbs, SSL uses a semi-conducting material to convert electricity directly into light, which maximizes the light's energy efficiency, the DOE said in a release. Solid-state lighting encompasses a variety of light-producing semi-conductor devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). "
Don't get me wrong, any amount they can put into this research is a good thing, but on the scale of things compared to funds they put elsewhere, it seems rather low to me. This is an area that needs significant changes soon, but unfortunately it looks like we're going to get incremental adoption of more fluorescents first.
It's astonishing to me that the energy and environmental problems are so obvious, but so little effort is put into the solutions.
There are also studies linking light pollution to increases in breast cancer. On the face of it, might seem a little whacky, but basically the theory is, light at night causes decreased endogenous melatonin production (it doesn't take much light to cause a significant drop in melatonin production) Melatonin is a strong anti-oxidant that they theorize helps keep breast cancer in check. Anyway, that's the current theory to explain the studies.
As production capacity and demand. If they really wanted to speed the adoption of LED lighting they would use that $21M to buy LED lights for government offices. Even better would be a law requiring the government use energy efficient lighting technology, that would provide for large orders and a guaranteed market which will lead the market to fill the need. It would have the benefit of reducing energy waste by the largest employer and landlord in the world.
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This is really something worth looking into. LED's are much more power efficient (which means they also give off less heat) and last much longer (need less replacing) than our current forms of lighting (incandescent, CCFL, etc). Car manufacturers such as Nissan are already starting to replace bulbs in their taillights with LED's. The only downsides I can see people complaining about are the fact that LED's are more directional than other forms of lighting and some may have issues with the shade of color they produce.
Now if our government would start looking into algae to power vehicles it would show that they're really interested in finding alternate and more efficient ways of powering our everyday devices.
Interesting. Do you have any references for properly lighting your home for maximum crime deterrence?
I have a streetlight right in front of my house, but have still had a couple minor criminal incidents.
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Hmm... if you have trichromatic light of wavelengths 570nm, 540nm, and 430nm shining on an object that absorbs everything except 550nm, then the object will appear black won't it? Whereas if true white light were shining on it, it would reflect the 550nm wavelengths and our eye would interpret that as... yellow or something. Is that wrong?
Of course it is. That's because you're only one person. But it isn't impressive to an entire nation, or an entire world, just the way you probably thought your mother and father were enormous mighty giants when you were six months old, but you don't now that you have a larger perspective.
Let's put it another way: divide that world consumption by the world population to see what your share is. The answer is less than a tenth of a barrel, or about 4 gallons of oil a year. You probably burn 100 times more oil in your car every year. Would you pay a few hundred dollars to save 4 gallons of oil a year? Or can you think, perhaps, of some better uses for that money, even if you restrict yourself to energy conservation?
The goal in life is not to randomly pursue every goal that is desirable, willy nilly. The goal is to pursue desirable goals in order of their importance. First you make sure you have a job you like, then you make sure your cubicle is decorated pleasantly. If you reverse the order in which you pursue these goals, you will not be happy.
Similarly, the sub-goals under the overall goal of energy efficiency should be pursued in order of their importance. Better traffic management on major city freeways -- linking cars through low-powered radios, say, and adding GPS receivers and some good traffic algorithms in an on-board module that can suggest optimal routes to drivers in real time -- would save more oil in a week than replacing everyone's desk lamp with an LED lamp would save in a century.
Building codes for sunny climates that take into account air-conditioning costs, so that, for example, windows are placed strategically to minimize solar heating, roofs are designed to avoid trapping hot air, attic fans are routinely installed, windows are double-glazed and weather-stripped to avoid heat losses, etc., would also save much more.
The plain fact is that most energy we use is used to either move heat from one place to another, or to move things from one place to another. Improving efficiency in those areas is the low-hanging fruit. Improving lighting efficiency is a glitzy feel-good measure that does very little, except that if it sucks up all the oxygen in a public energy efficiency impulse, it prevents us from doing stuff that really would have a serious impact.
Not by itself, and for that matter, it's unlikely that any single energy-saving technology is going to make a significant difference. But what if we were able to get a 2% reduction in energy usage on 5 different fronts: internal lighting, building cooling, building heating, electrical appliances, and internal combustion engines. That would be a 10% reduction in our overall energy usage, which would be a lot of energy, given the size of our economy and how much energy we consume.
Think about the development of the laptop computer, and what it took to make that possible. There wasn't a single development that made it possible to make computers that weighed under 10 lbs., it was a whole host of new technologies: thin displays, powerful batteries, smaller hard drives, and then some clever application of existing technologies. Likewise, if your goal is to reduce energy consumption, it will probably take a whole host of new technologies and some careful considerations of how to better use our existing technology to do the same job with less energy.
The three color receptors are relatively broad. I remember reading about a study where they presented subjects across the world with color chips to find out which shades of red, green, and blue were the most saturated. The idea was to see if everybody saw color in the same way excluding the known forms of color blindness and tetrachromates. Everybody picked the same shade of red and blue but there were two different shades of green which they later tracked down to two different alleles for the gene which encodes the green receptor molecule.
You forgot to acount for the decreased heat load by going with a more efficient light source.