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braccia
Beware technology bearing gifts; turn off the light
Peter Clarke
8/8/2012 11:00 AM EDT
Technology is great...and I know you can sense a "but" coming.
And the "but" is the law of unintended consequences.
Consider the light-emitting diode and the solid-state light. Humanity has gone from burning candles to gas light to incandescent bulbs to fluorescent strip lights and now we are now entering the era of LED solid-state lighting.
The advantage that drives adoption comes from the greater efficiency of energy conversion in LEDs and the fact that far less energy is "wasted" in the form of heat. Cost efficiencies should also come from the fact the LED lights can be engineered to last much longer than incandescent bulbs.
The benefit of solid-state lighting is usually presented thus; you can have the same amount of light for much less energy outlay. That's good for the householder and good for the planet. It may not be so good for the energy supply company but not many people care about that.
But I argue something different is going to happen; is already happening.
Because the energy consumption and cost of running lights is reduced by the move to solid-state lighting, householders and corporations and authorities both local and national are tending to install more lights, including outdoor lights in particular and just leave them to be controlled by day/night sensors.
So, effectively, we collectively may spend slightly less money and consume slightly less energy on lighting our lives but we will also have much more light, all day and all night. That's reasonably good for the energy companies but not particularly good for people or the planet and bad for astronomers who wish to look at the stars without their vision being obscured by skyglow.
That's not to say the LED lighting cannot be made more energy efficient than previous forms of lighting and should not be adopted. It can, it should and it will. But at the same time it is necessary to implement appropriate controls to prevent energy waste and unnecessary light pollution.
One aspect of lighting is that when you exercise your human right of expression to install and operate a little porch light you destroy the darkness or add to the light pollution for miles around.
This law of unintended consequences reminds me of a quote attributed to Walter Brattain, one of the co-inventors of the transistor. After Brattain retired from Bell Labs he returned to Walla Walla, Washington, to teach at his alma mater Whitman College. He said his one regret about inventing the transistor was its application to transistor radios that continuously played rock and roll music around the campus.
Brattain's idea that the transistor radio suddenly meant that for the first time there was noise everywhere and continuously has a parallel with the advent of LED lighting.
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peter.clarke
8/8/2012 11:51 AM EDT
And in any case, everyone knows rock'n'roll sounds better through a valve amplifier.
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lighthouse
8/10/2012 10:57 PM EDT
There's a deeper issue there.
Incandescents = basically same technology as vaccum tubes or valves.
LEDs (diodes emitting light) basicaly same solid state technology as transistors.
Were "energy guzzling" tubes banned just because transistors came along? No
Transistors were seen as better on the market place (as opposed to Gov committees), but the tubes retain advantages for special applications,
just like incandescents would, even if "superceded" by other lighting technology.
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DMcCunney
8/10/2012 11:11 PM EDT
An old friend is a textbook example, He can no longer find old-style incandescent bulbs where he lives. The problem is, he has a collection of lava lamps (remember them?) that use incandescents both for lighting and the heat that causes the lava motion. I was able to point him at an online source and he bought a case.
He fumes about government regulation mandating the switch to newer lighting because it bit him.
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lighthouse
8/10/2012 11:07 PM EDT
To expand on the last point, and as commented before:
All lighting has advantages.
No lighting technology can "replace" another.
LEDs are ideal in sheet or panel form,
Fluorescents in long tube form.
They are compromised as politically pushed replacements for simple incandescent bulbs,
with particular difficulties to achieve omnidirectional and broad spectrum and, not least, bright 100W+ equivalent lighting in the smaller bulb format.
The article author here talks of energy savings,
but that is not the only reason for choosing a light bulb:
Ironically anyway, overall society energy savings are marginal, c.1% grid energy use based on DoE and EU (UK, Cambridge) data as referenced below, without counting the also referenced life cycle energy comparisons.
Besides, given coal as the main environmental "culprit":
From referenced coal plant cycle operation, (with UK data too for Peter!) little coal or CO2 is saved regardless of what light bulb is used.
The Deception behind Light Bulb Switchover Arguments
13 points, referenced
http://tonn.ie/p/deception-behind-banning-light-bulbs.html
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lighthouse
8/10/2012 11:38 PM EDT
Ah, Peter is also the article author, missed that :-)
Anyway, the point about turning off lights is well made, not least for Gov politicians telling others what bulbs they can use, while leaving their buildings lit up all night.
Saw the milky way in the night sky recently out in the countryside. Breathtaking.
Perseid meteor shower
"peak over Britain Saturday 11th Aug"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9467582/Perseid-meteor-shower-to-reach-peak-over-Britain.html
...if you can see it!
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george.leopold
8/8/2012 12:14 PM EDT
I happen to live in a community with few street lights. Even though it's in the middle of a large metropolitan area, I am able to star gaze most nights. We limit outside lighting to a yard light that goes out at bedtime and solar-powered lights to illuminate the steep steps to our front entrance. All this works fine.
We do notice that office building lights continue to stay on too long. Companies should be installing control systems to shut off lights about the same time I turn off my yard light.
More importantly, these control systems should be used to control air conditioning, which I would argue wastes far more energy than lighting. Many office workers and restaurant goers complain that they are cold. Turn up the damned AC! It's meant to take the moisture out of the air, not to chill it until people are freezing.
AC turned 100 years old this week. Below is an audio link to a radio discussion about how much energy is wasted through air conditioning, and how power demand is going to skyrocket as more humans begin using AC:
http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player?nid=16430
One likely outcome is that the massive power outage in India is likely to be repeated.
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daleste
8/8/2012 10:47 PM EDT
Air conditioning depends on the location. Here in Texas, many people die in the summer because they don't have air conditioning. When I was young, we had evaporative cooling and it wasn't that hot, even outside. Now that everyone has refrigerated cooling, it seems much hotter outside. I tell my kids that it is because of all of those compressors running outside heating up the air.
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Bert22306
8/9/2012 2:43 PM EDT
"I tell my kids that it is because of all of those compressors running outside heating up the air."
But you know that isn't really correct, right?
The majority of the heat pumped out of the house, in the form of hot air from the compressor unit outside, is compensated by cold air indoors. If that indoor cold air were forever separated from outside air, your house would soon become an ice cube inside.
The fact that the house does not become an ice cube proves that the cold air inside is "cooling the outside air," in a very real sense, balancing out most of that hot air generated by the outdoor unit.
The cold from indoors gets outside through the occasional open door, as well as conduction and convection through window frames, window glass, and walls. (Actually, more accurately, the heat from outside is sunk through these windows and walls -- same effect, only backwards.)
My guess is that when you were a kid, the heat outside didn't bother you as much as now, simply because you were a kid. There were other things on your mind.
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peter.clarke
8/8/2012 12:31 PM EDT
I don't argue with you over air conditioning and office lighting.
And its clearly better to turn off your yard light and the lights for steep steps at bed time rather than leave them on all night.
But does that mean that those lights are on in the evening when you are not using the yard or the steep steps? Winter evenings can be 4pm to midnight in U.K.
Surely it would be even better to have the lights come on just for the time when you go out to the yard and when you come in they get turned off.
The more that energy is saved from unnecessary lighting the more that is available for more essential activities. But I do understand that necessary/unnecessary is a judgement call.
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george.leopold
8/8/2012 12:39 PM EDT
The backyard lights are on a motion sensor, so we're doing out part there.
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junko.yoshida
8/8/2012 1:24 PM EDT
Well put, Peter.
Actually, until I interviewed NXP's CEO a few months ago (http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4371934/NXP-today---Practically-a-Chinese-company-?pageNumber=0), I didn't know what the third largest source of energy consumption at home was. It turns out it's lighting.
Clemmer was talking about this in the context of how China is “absolutely serious about ‘energy reduction,’” which is one of the key targets of China’s current five-year plan spanning to 2015.
LED or not, after all, turning off lights -- which my mother religiously did in every room of our house when we were growing up --was the right thing to do.
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anne-francoise.pele
8/9/2012 4:47 AM EDT
At home... and in buildings.
Indeed, lighting is becoming the largest consumer of electricity in buildings, accounting for 25 percent or more of total costs.
Turn off the light is one solution. Switching to smart lighting is another. See here: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4375945/Adding-intelligence-to-lighting-
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lighthouse
8/10/2012 11:21 PM EDT
One should be clear about
- and differentiate between -
consumers saving energy on most commonly used bulbs, and actual grid and "Save the Planet" effect of people switching light bulbs, since the latter effect is marginal, the odd percent or two.
Typical Government switch-promoting statements (EU USA and elsewhere) like "20% of energy use being lighting", actually includes street lighting and much else, irrelevant to any home consumer switchover push.
Data references
http://ceolas.net/#li171x
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braccia
9/13/2012 11:30 AM EDT
Yes lighthouse is right!
People keep confusing lighting usage, with actual national switchover savings from banning domestically used incandescent bulbs.
The switchover savings are negligible, fractions of 1% on the institutionally linked data (I checked, also other sources),
and that is swallowed anyway as they are used off-peak at night when there is surplus electricity wasted.
It is just a case of telling dumb consumers they can't use what they want.
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R0ckstar
8/8/2012 2:22 PM EDT
This is a good point about the proliferating led lighting technology. It's not just the efficiency that encourages over-use, but new capabilities such as rgb units with color controllers. I myself am guilty of using a color unit with random color dynamics on my patio because they look cool, like a ufo is landing in my back yard. It's not completely necessary, but as an art form, what art is?
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DMcCunney
8/8/2012 3:16 PM EDT
"The benefit of solid-state lighting is usually presented thus; you can have the same amount of light for much less energy outlay. That's good for the householder and good for the planet. It may not be so good for the energy supply company but not many people care about that."
Can't speak for other areas, but I'm in NYC, and my power utility is ConEd. I'd say they are just *delighted*. Their problem is capacity constraints.
Power demand is constantly rising, and where will it come from? Building *new* generating capacity is fantastically expensive, and complicated by the fact that no one wants it built near *them*, and that political and regulatory issues will make it hard to get funding to build the new generating plants, because it will be hard to raise the rates to cover the financing costs.
ConEd is pushing conservation and energy efficiency as hard as they can in consequence. The last thing they want to do is build more generating stations. The more usage they can squeeze out of existing generating capacity, the happier they are.
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Bert22306
8/8/2012 4:50 PM EDT
I dropped my flashlight from a ladder. Luckily, because it has an LED bulb, it worked fine after I picked it up. Also, my NiMH cells never deplete when using the LED, as they used to before with a less bright halogen bulb. This just goes to show two clear advantages of LED lighting. Durability and energy efficiency.
It would take installing 5 lights of equal lumen output to the previous one incandescent, to undo the advantage of LED lighting. And the efficiency is only increasing, as these bright LEDs evolve. But sure, even a good thing can be abused.
I don't count this as "law of unintended consequences." To me, an unintended consequence is not that we can get more well lit streets for less energy, but more something along the lines of pollution when you have to dispose of them. In other words, an obvious liability. If we can avoid the constraints that forced us to have poorly lit streets previously, for example, that's supposed to be a good thing.
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peter.clarke
8/9/2012 4:59 AM EDT
Well-lit streets all night every night with nobody on them just sounds like a waste of energy.
What's wrong with having unlit streets as the status quo and if you need to see carry a torch?
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Bert22306
8/9/2012 2:49 PM EDT
I've no problem with that. Every bit helps. For whatever it's worth, we tend to keep lights off in empty rooms of the house, so that kind of savings technique wouldn't amount to much for us.
And at the same time, those sensor systems create a small but constant load on the electrical system all by themselves, just to keep track of people coming and going.
And they are also not trouble free. I stayed recently in two hotel rooms where the bathroom lights were controlled that way. But the switch didn't work right in both of them. So you ended up having to mess with it over and over again, just to get them on.
No free lunch.
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expendable crewman #1
8/8/2012 6:37 PM EDT
Don't add cost saving in your equations! You can be sure that if your usage goes down the price per Kilowatt will go up. That is exactly what happened to us after the electric company started their save energy advertizing campaign. Everyone saved energy and the electric company sent a notice that because of reduced generation they had to raise their rates to cover their facility expansion and maintenance needs. My bills are exactly the same as they were last year even though I am using less energy. The same is true for all our energy providers. As our cars get more efficient and we use mass transit the oil companies raise their prices to continue a steady revenue stream.
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Bert22306
8/8/2012 6:48 PM EDT
Yes, I can buy that, but in a sense that's the best of all worlds.
If the ultimate goal is to preserve scarce resources and the environment in general, then we cannot merely make it easy for people to become even more slovenly and wasteful than they already are. The best of all worlds being, the higher efficiency products allow people to live at least as well as before, while doing far less damage to the environment.
Keeping costs where they need to be, so that people don't act irresponsibly out of sheer self-indulgence, is part of the picture. Otherwise, we'd get nowhere. One step ahead, two steps back.
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DMcCunney
8/8/2012 7:05 PM EDT
"Everyone saved energy and the electric company sent a notice that because of reduced generation they had to raise their rates to cover their facility expansion and maintenance needs."
While *individual* usage may drop, *total* demand continues to rise. At some point, your utility is looking at building new capacity to meet the demand. That costs *money*. Where does the money come from? It's going to be reflected in your rates.
" As our cars get more efficient and we use mass transit the oil companies raise their prices to continue a steady revenue stream."
It's nowhere near that simple, and price at the pump has far more to do with the futures market than the price at the wellhead.
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Duane Benson
8/9/2012 2:54 AM EDT
I believe that you're right about the changes in attitude that will occur with the reduced energy required per unit of light with LEDs. It's human nature. People will use more lights when lights use less energy.
However, we have the power to pull a fast one on human nature. As LED prices come down, making them commercially viable, general semiconductor prices are going down as well.
There's intelligent lighting in the house. It's a very familiar topic at this point. We may have more lights in the room, but we can design those lights so that they only put the light where and when it's needed.
Perhaps there's a design in someone's head out there for intelligent street lighting. LEDs go on and off instantly. When they are powerful and economical enough to replace high intensity street lamps, they can go off when no one is around. The big lights have to stay on constantly because of the start up energy, thermal stress and a number of other issues. LEDs won't have those problems.
We could but up ten times the number of outdoor lights but leave them off until a person or car is in close proximity. That could dramatically reduce power consumption while making streets safer at night and reducing light pollution.
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peter.clarke
8/9/2012 4:26 AM EDT
I like your thinking Duane.
And seen from a far it will be like a twinkling light show.
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peter.clarke
8/9/2012 5:01 AM EDT
One other unintended consequence that I failed to mention is that the move to higher brightness solid-state lighting will drive a trend towards fewer, higher brightness sources.
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agk
8/9/2012 9:56 AM EDT
What ever it be when the cost of LED lighting brought down by a factor of 10 then at that time we will save lot of naturally available resources by a factor of 3 which will serve our future generations.
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lighthouse
8/11/2012 1:00 AM EDT
Just came across this, from 2009,
by a Greek philosopher (ok, scientist!)
In his mention of "future use of CFLs", much surely applies to LEDs too...
Antonis Christofides, "On banning the bulb"
http://itia.ntua.gr/antonis/environment/on-banning-the-bulb/
Extract, following a section about supposed energy savings...
"Interestingly, I doubt even that we are going to actually have these alleged savings of 150 GW, because people have the tendency to use as much energy as they can.
If you replace your lamps with CFLs, you will probably be less careful about switching them off when you don't use them, because you know that they consume much less power.
The phrase "lights will never go out" in Siemens' press release reflects a way of thinking that is dominant in society.
We use more and more light, wanting our cities to be more and more luminous. As a result, we have destroyed the night sky, whose beauty has been occupying poets for millenia, whereas words like "twilight", that were once common in our vocabulary, today are strictly academic.
(continued)
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lighthouse
8/11/2012 1:01 AM EDT
(continued)
Unfortunately, it is not only the night sky that we are missing, but the beauty of the night itself. That we like darkness is obvious by the fact that, if the light of a street lamp gets too much into our room, we close our window blinds in order to sleep; that we like to go to dimly lit restaurants and bars; and that we love the dim light of candles and fireplaces. And yet the tendency today is to flood our cities with artificial light and eliminate darkness altogether. In this respect, CFLs may have a bad environmental impact, because having to pay for the energy can stop us from using too much light; if CFLs are as cheap as it is advertised, this will lift this economic obstacle to light pollution, while the increased usage may mean that the true energy savings may be considerably less than 150 GW.
In summary, all the fuss about CFLs is about a debatable 1% of alleged energy savings, accompanied by toxic waste, light pollution, and worse light quality."
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M_S
8/15/2012 12:07 PM EDT
Regarding saving energy by using motion-sensing technology, I often see our outside lights turned on by animals running through the yard and even by wind blowing weeds. That doesn't save energy!
As far as utilities not raising rates due to conservation, here in New Mexico we have had the main utility request rate hikes citing the reduced energy usage as the reason for requiring the increase.
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Colin Henshaw
8/22/2012 7:38 AM EDT
This was something that I said myself several years ago, and it is only now that others are beginning to realise it.
As cheaper and more efficient CFL and LED lighting became available, consumers could now afford more of these for the original price of one incandescent bulb. Consequently they are tempted to install more lights resulting in more light nuisance and light pollution.
Consequently we need more stringent legislation to govern the application of lighting at night. For most purposes, 11p.m. curfews and motion operated lighting, in combination, would be ideal, in order to reduce the negative effects of lights being on all the time after dark.
Lighting in rural areas is not appropriated and should not be installed unless it is absolutely necessary.
Vanity lighting, in the form of skybeams, lasers, and floodlit buildings and monuments are unacceptable in, or if they can be seen from, residential, suburban or rural areas.
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peter.clarke
9/11/2012 10:32 AM EDT
Colin
I am with you.
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Frank Eory
8/24/2012 6:17 PM EDT
Why should anyone bother with saving 1-2% of the grid usage by converting to LED lighting? Our politicians want us all to start driving EVs, which will result in exponential increases in electricity consumption, requiring massive investments in new generating capacity.
The 1-2% savings from LED lighting will seem a bit Quixotic in an era in which per capita electricity consumption moves to record highs never before imagined.
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braccia
9/13/2012 11:45 AM EDT
Frank is more right than he knows!
There is an earlier link here in the thread that is interesting.
http://tonn.ie/p/deception-behind-banning-light-bulbs.html
I do not agree with the author in criticism of for example LEDs - but see point 6 energy savings and the institutional references
eg. Cambridge University Network under Sir Alec Broers, Chairman of the UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, Scientific Alliance newsletter
"The total reduction in EU energy use would be 0.54 x 0.8 x 0.76% = 0.33%,
This figure is almost certainly an overestimate, particularly as the inefficiency of conventional bulbs generates heat which supplements other forms of heating in winter.
Which begs the question: is it really worth it?
Politicians are forcing a change to a particular technology which is fine for some applications but not universally liked, and which has disadvantages.
The problem is that legislators are unable to tackle the big issues of energy use effectively, so go for the soft target of a high profile domestic use of energy... ...This is gesture politics."
And it's not even
"Every little helps" logic...
the marginal savings are swallowed not just by the other factors, but since such lighting is used off-peak at night when there is surplus electricity wasted anyway (not least coal).
The overall issue of unnecessary consumption
might need looking at - but in the case of citizens switching lighting, and the society gains from it, it is simply about dumb citizens unnecessarily stopped in their choices.
All lighting types have advantages, in different applications around the house.
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peter.clarke
9/11/2012 10:36 AM EDT
Why should we bother Frank?
Because, in my view, we have a responsibility to limit the impact we collectively (and therefore individually) have on the planet.
There is a conflict between human beings as inherent consumers enjoying exponential growth in numbers and the long-term sustainability of their place on the planet.
I don't have an answer but maybe we can pull back on consumption to give the next generation a change of finding one?
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