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We're
all familiar with how quickly technology adoption happens
these days. The time it took for televisions to become
commonplace was much longer than for VCRs which was much
longer than for cell phones and on and on we go. This
quickening of our capacity to take on any truly relevant and
transformative technology only continues with tablets and
smart phones. You can already find video's of 3d printers
and wonder what that will be like. LED lights are right at
that point of inflection where they are truly found
everywhere and like the cell phone or television, there are
very real reasons for its adoption. In order to understand
where we are now, let's look at where we came from. Let's
take a quick look at the history of LED lights to this
point.
Although the theory of what drove LED light
(electroluminescence) has been around since the early
1900's, the first real practical LED light goes back to 1962
as the result of a GE engineer, Nick Holonyak, Jr. The
original LED produced red light as the color of LED light is
a function of the underlying semiconducting material. The
light creates reflects the energy gap of the material
creating the light. Red is actually the lowest energy
wavelength in the visible spectrum (light we can see) so it
makes sense that the first LED light would be red. Over the
next few decades, "brighter" colors or colors with more
energy were generated from LED light including yellow in
1972 and eventually, bright white in 1976. These new
"colors" of LED light were created by discovering new
conducting materials with appropriate energy gaps and
corresponding photons. They were still very expensive and
not commercially applicable at that time. LED's were
relegated to calculator lights and various electronic
signals.
LED's
are essentially electronic in nature and therefore, they
tend to respond to the logarithmic rules of advancements in
efficiency, cost, and lumens. Since the 1960's, advances
along efficiency and lumens (a measure of light strength)
have increased exponentially. It was a matter of time and a
little bit of color tuning (finding the right materials to
create the light color and quality we want) before such
rapid advances forced LED's onto to commercial lighting
market. That point has been reached in the 2000's. We are
now on the cusp of a huge marketplace transformation from
two existing lighting formats (incandescents and the interim
fix, fluorescents) to LED's and by the end of 2019, it would
be surprising to find anything less than a super-majority of
the lighting marketplace not residing in the LED camp.
Let's talk about the part of this historical and exponential
curve that most interests us....Now.
Historically, there a few issues with LED's as source of
lighting. First, we needed the right color or quality of
light. This includes brightness as well. We were limited
in this choice until the last few years since the light
created was a function of the semiconductor material and the
light was of a small wavelength footprint (think fluorescent
versus sunshine). That's no longer the case. We can color
tune our light color down to 2700 Kelvin (most LED's still
run down to 3000 Kelvin at best). Lower Kelvin translates
into warmer light which is optimum for replacing
incandescents. LED's are already better than fluorescents
or CFLs but the crown of light color has always been
incandescent. No longer. The historical improvement of
LED's efficiency now makes it a significantly less expensive
lighting option over the life of an LED bulb (which is much
longer than incandescent or CFL's by a factor of up to 20
times). We now have all the form factors needed from
spots, strips, floods, and even dimmable LED ligths. We are
at the point where the adoption of LED lighting goes
parabolic...a line straight up on the curve. Isn't it
good to be alive right now! |
