Moore's Law for Lights?

LED lighting is far cheaper to run, and causes far less environmental issues than most other options. Photo / Thinkstock

Recently, while doing some home renovations, our sparky asked me what sort of lights I'd like. I was uncharacteristically (and momentarily) bamboozled. Having never donated even the teensiest smidgeon of thought to something as unexciting as lighting, I'd rashly assumed that I'd still be using the same old screw in jobbies that we'd always used. Boy was I wrong.

In the end however the question was well timed, as I'd have otherwise missed a quiet revolution that looks set to completely transform how people light up homes and offices, and more importantly, how much they're paying to do so as well as what price is being paid by the environment to keep us all illuminated.

Until recently our available alternatives to candles were limited to incandescent or fluorescent bulbs, both of which had hardly changed in eons. Whilst both worked, each has their own shortcomings. Incandescent bulbs deliver a natural warm light, but guzzle electricity like a weightwatchers convention in pizza shop. Fluorescent tubes on the other hand are more energy efficient, but typically deliver a harsher, and colder light.

Straddling the two are Energy efficient bulbs. These may be more efficient and last longer, but they contain heavy metals such as mercury, which effectively renders any environmental credentials they may have next to useless once they end up in landfill. Enter stage left solid-state LED lighting.

Where incandescent bulbs put electrical current across a metal filament to generate light, and fluorescents use electricity to excite neon gas that in turn lights up a phosphor coating inside the tube, LEDs are semiconductors, just like the microchips that populate most modern day gadgets, and this gives them some pretty nifty advantages.

LED lighting can be anything up to 10 times more economical than even an energy efficient light bulb, and better still, will outlast them by a massive margin. Most importantly however, LEDs are also evolving at an explosive pace, just like their silicon cousins the microprocessor.

Just as Intel's Gordon Moore coined Moores Law (which has accurately predicted a steady level of performance improvements for the silicon powering personal computers, smartphones and a bevy of other gizmos I couldn't live without), a researcher named Roland Haitz, at Hewlett-Packard, has tracked the historical prices of LEDs, and projected them forwards to estimate that the amount of light LEDs produced would increase by a 20 per cent per decade, whilst their costs would drop over the same period by a factor of 10.

The need for extremely energy efficiency lighting such as LEDs hasn't escaped the attention of global governments either. In the USA, the EU, Australia even NZ, governments are looking to phase out inefficient lighting as legislating for a more efficient solution can save billions of dollars per year, and decrease dependence on oil, reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

Cutting a long story short, I decided to go with the LED option. Whilst the cost of going with solid state lighting where high, the decision was a complete no-brainer as the costs were easily outweighed by the sheer energy efficiencies of LEDs.

At the end of the day, the LED's mounted in my newly renovated ceiling are practically indistinguishable from traditional lighting, yet I can rest easy knowing that a light left on by mistake isn't going to put us in the poor house or push the environmental equivalent of the doomsday clock forwards by more than a hair's breadth.