Its 2012 and in another two years you wont be able to find incandescent lamps anymore. That’s right folks; the traditional soft white lamps you have in your kitchen or hanging in your restaurant will no longer be easily available. So what will we do and what is the future of lighting?
If you haven’t heard it from someone else you are hearing it now from Dr. Bulb: LED and solid state lighting is the future. They are durable and small enough to fit on a key chain, they last for close to a decade, and they are extremely energy efficient. The movement away from incandescent to LED is occurring, but it is happening slower and more painfully than VCs or entrepreneurs expected.
With LED technology, you change lamps less, experience less lumen depreciation, and save massive amounts on your energy bill. So what is keeping people from this new technology?
Unfortunately, LEDs have not yet made it into the home on a large scale. However, they have started to make it into the enterprise. Groom Energy and Greentech Media Research predict that the LED enterprise lighting market will grow by 30 percent in 2011 and surpass $1 billion in annual revenue by 2014. The 2010 U.S. market for commercial and industrial LED lighting is sized at $330 million in annual revenue.
The initial cost of LED lighting doesn’t help the cause, either: light bulbs show tremendous price elasticity. This means that small changes in the price will have a much larger effect on the demand.
Fred Maxik, the founder and CTO of the 900-employee Lighting Science Group, doesn’t feel that cost is holding the industry back. He said recently that in commercial and retail applications, LEDs can today be justified on an energy efficiency basis. What’s needed, according to Maxik, is consumer education. More consumers and business owners need to understand the benefits of this technology and spread the good word.
Where are the LED evangelists? Why are there not people shouting from the rooftops that they reduced their home energy costs by hundreds of dollars. Here at my Dr. Bulb headquarters, I just installed a bunch of new >Kumho LED lamps in various fixtures as well as my track lighting system. These are currently available on Amazon. Adopting a new lighting technology shouldn’t be that hard. Not only am I saving big on my monthly energy costs, but I have some of the most high tech and lamps available in the lighting industry. Jealous? Get your own today and let the saving begin!