LEDs Twinkle Brighter

While many green-holiday gift givers are handing compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) to their unenlightened friends and family, the real future is in light-emitting diodes (LEDs), writes Craig Rubens.

And below are some random bits and pieces of information about LEDs and CFLs that I gleaned from a few different articles online.

A comment at this article about GE Lighting's future plans in this space says:

LED based lamps burn 1/100th the power for the same light output as a typical incandescent, and last hundreds and even thousands of times as long as an incandescent, for about 20 times the price of an incandescent.

Compact Fluorescents are the stupidest energy saving device one can own, burning over 10 times the power of an equivalent LED and lasting only about twice as long as an incandescent.

“Fluorescents are so over,” wrote Barnaby Feder of the New York Times recently

States and even entire continents are considering plans to ban the incandescent bulb. In five years cheap, inefficient incandescent bulbs will be illegal in the US as mandated by the recently inked Energy Bill.

Lighting accounts for 22 percent of the energy usage in the U.S., according to the Department of Energy, energy-efficient lighting technology — from fluorescent to light-emitting diodes — is literally lighting the future. It is estimated that the switch from incandescents to CFLs will save $40 billion and 50 million tons of carbon emissions.