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Eco Friendly LED Lighting Comes of Age in the New Green Economy

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Eco Friendly LED Lighting Comes of Age in the New Green Economy

LED lighting technology opens the door to the first truly "super-efficient, cost-effective" lighting solutions for commercial, institutional, and residential applications. The newest generation of LED bulbs have been designed to use the same lighting fixtures as incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs. In the case of standard fluorescent bulbs the installer needs to cut the ballast wire as it is not utilized with the LED replacement bulbs. An added bonus to this generation of LED bulbs is that, in most cases, they are dimmable, unlike many of the bulbs they are designed to replace.

An industry insider who did not wish to be identified said “For the first time, this type of LED bulb offers dramatic energy savings at a sensible cost, which will enable rapid customer payback and ongoing energy savings. We anticipate very high customer interest and significant demand, especially in the retail and hospitality industries. This is particularly true when businesses realize the substantial additional savings of 90% or more in labor costs associated with frequent changing of incandescent bulbs."

The new LED bulbs have many of the usual advantages of solid-state lighting technology, such as low power consumption (the bulbs consume as little as 3.0-5.6 watts), robustness (they have a polycarbonate housing) and a long service utilization life (claimed to be 50,000-100,000 hours).

The key appears to be in the thermal dissipation technology being employed in the new LED bulbs that significantly reduces heat generated by the bulb, leading to cooler operation and longer life. Also, by utilizing the new smaller, brighter LEDs packed in the same area, the bulb produces more light without increasing the size of the bulb package. This produces a bulb with superior light quality and consistency while producing up to 30% greater light output per LED which translates to fewer LEDs per bulb; and since LEDs account for the majority of a bulb's cost, this translates into a lower cost per bulb.

The newer bulbs also seem to have resolved the problem of color shift over time (caused, for example, when phosphors degrade in white LEDs) by using red, green and blue chips in the bulbs.

Looking at the ROI –

Return on Investment comparisons between standard incandescent R-30 floodlights and the new LEDs generates a startling set of numbers…

The standard incandescent R-30 costs about $3.50 per bulb and lasts about 2,000 hours. The new LED replacement costs about $35 but lasts between 50,000-100,000 hours.

Using the 50,000 LED life, to equal one LED bulb, a customer would have to purchase 25 incandescent bulbs for $87.50 (versus one LED bulb for $35).

When you factor in the additional labor of replacing the 25 incandescent bulbs the savings becomes potentially astronomical. In a commercial or an institutional location, the cost of labor to change a light bulb must be factored into the total cost comparison. A 300-room hotel using LED bulbs could save as much as $60,000 annually in costs for light bulbs, electricity, and labor.

Looking at the energy efficiencies generates similar savings…

A series of incandescent bulbs delivering a total of 50,000 hours of use would cost $276 to operate at a cost of $0.085 per kilowatt-hour for the electricity.

One LED bulb would use only $28 of electricity over the same period, a saving of almost 90%.

LED bulbs are available today in almost any existing bulb design or configuration. They emit a variety of temperatures in the warm to bright white light or amber light for indoor or outdoor use, sometimes found in facilities such as parking garages. Incandescent and fluorescent bulbs may be tinted yellow or amber, but they still emit light outside the desired color range.

CFL vs. LED

It is interesting to note that CFL (compact fluorescent light) offers a 10x savings on energy over standard bulbs, which is good, but characteristically they do not dim well. LED bulbs offer a 10X over CFL and typically 25X over standard incandescent bulbs (without the dimming problems).

With the mercury in florescent lighting, LEDs are an environmentally obvious choice. A 25 Watt CFL is equal to a 100 Watt incandescent while a 16 Watt LED will produce the same light output. A CFL lasts 10 times as long as an incandescent, but an LED will last 100 times as long.

The Bottom Line

As with most business decisions even the green we spend to green the planet often comes down to the bottom line. In these tough economic times, people need to see that the ROI is so compelling that the savings alone make the decision a no-brainer. Saving the planet is a bonus we all get to enjoy.

Editors note: Howard Lubert is the Managing Partner and Senior Analyst of SafeHatch LLC, a technology consulting firm in Wayne, PA that works with the private equity community and startup technology companies. He is so enamored with this concept he has taken an Executive Director position with a Philadelphia area company called GreenandSave, LLC which specializes in this type of green energy savings programs.

CES 2009 - Smaller is Better

Details: Written by Brad Pransky, Editor

CES 2009 was a bit smaller than in previous years. The economy played a big part in that both attendance in general plus the size and scope of the presence of various manufacturers was diminished. With a slightly lighter crowd of about 120,000, it was easier to get around although still much too big to be able to see everything within the allotted time.

That CES was an incremental show this year was not a big surprise. Given the pervasive gloomy economic atmosphere we did not expect to see huge new developments in technology. There were a number of incremental improvements in the areas of large flat screens and refresh rates, as well as other refinements in the video and audio sectors overlapping both entertainment and computing devices.

So all the hype aside, three items caught our attention in very different categories.

Mobile and Smart Phones - Palm™ PRE™ {CES 2009 Best in Show)

At an invitation-only press event, Palm™ previewed their next generation Smart P

hone and operating system. I will be the first to admit that when I entered the room and seated myself comfortably, I expected to see a standard song and dance about some new little whiz-bang feature on an otherwise typical cell phone. I was very pleasantly surprised at Palm's new offering.

Palm obviously put a great deal of time and thought into the design and engineering of this forthcoming product. We got an opportunity to get hands on with

the new PRE™ at the reception in Palm’s conference room. The shape of the new PRE™ is the first thing that caught our attention. It fits quite comfortably in your hand and with the lower portion extended it has the perfect slightly curved shape to conduct phone conversations.

The full touch screen interface, while obviously reminiscent of Apple's iPhone, utilizes a completely new operating system based on Java, CSS, and HT

ML. The multi-touch capabilities and Palm’s new approach to organizing and unifying communications will make this an intriguing and useful business tool. The slide down keyboard is also a major improvement to utilizing just the screen for typing and input. SMS lovers will really appreciate this feature.

The new Palm PRE™ will not be available for several months and will initially be exclusive to the Sprint network. We are very much looking forward to our chance to test drive this new smart phone.

AMD Athlon NEO

We expected to see a lot of interesting mobile devices, both smart phone and computers at CES. We took along a Lenovo Netbook to field test during the trip (More about that in an upcoming review article.) One of the things that we were curious to investigate was why we had not yet seen any offerings in this area utilizing an AMD processor.

We have seen Netbooks from HP, Lenovo, MSI, Asus and Acer, but all of these employ either the Intel Atom™ or a VIA processor and chipset. I was fortunate to get an opportunity to speak with Jo Betsy Vaught, Brand Manager, Mobile division, from AMD who is involved with the new Athlon Neo processor and showed me a pre-production model of an HP laptop using the chip.

The specs on the new processor are impressive. It only draws 15 W of power, and in conjunction with the necessary north and south bridge connections 35 W.

This is more than the Intel Atom processor; however, the performance of this K8 core CPU is impressive.

AMD is positioning this chip to fill the gap between the ultraportable Netbooks, and the chunkier 15-inch notebooks. The new form factor is being dubbed Ultrathin. The distinction is not one so much of size, but of power. It is targeted at the mobile user who likes the idea of a notebook but desires a bit more speed and capability than the Atom class processors can provide.

We watched a demonstration of the HP Ultrathin running a blue ray DVD with perfect clarity. This is something the Netbooks would be hard pressed to do with the more limited CPU and graphics capabilities they possess.

Based on what we saw at CES, we would anticipate pricing to start at around the $699 level putting it squarely in the sweet spot between the ultraportable and notebook form factors. We don't expect this new offering to be an ‘Atom smasher’, as it is not meant to directly compete in that space. We do expect that it will pull substantial sales from both markets.

3D - It's coming at you...

3D was this year’s buzzword. Most of the major flat screen manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, and LG had some form of 3-D presentation setup. This was also accompanied by manufacturers such as NVIDIA, demonstrating their take on 3-D gaming. Besides general entertainment, gaming will be one of the other two main markets for your 3-D viewing pleasure. [If you haven't guessed by now, what that "other" market is, your arteries have probably already hardened and 3-D glasses wouldn't help your eyesight a bit.]

There are various technologies used to produce a 3-D image, some of which have been around for years. All of the technologies are based on fooling your mind into thinking that the flat image you're looking at is actually three-dimensional. We all have seen, or even used, those odd little red and green cardboard glasses to view some "creature from the Black Lagoon" 3-D flick.

Another alternative is polarized lenses. With this method two different polarized images are projected and filtered to the eyes via a different set of cardboard glasses with polarized lenses. The newest entry into this optical sleight-of-hand field is liquid crystal shuttered lenses. These are the type being used by NVIDIA for their 3-D gaming offering. The short version of how they work is simply that each eye’s lens flickers on and off at a very high rate of speed to deliver the necessary delay in time and perspective to fool the mind into perceiving three dimensions.

We tested the technology at CES, and it was most impressive. It does have a limitation in that currently it can only work in a gaming environment. Its one other drawback is that it is a bit pricey at $399.

The writing is definitely on the screen. 3-D is an up and coming technology that now has backing from both major movie production houses as well as gaming companies. I would expect that by next year's CES, we will see a lot more offerings in the consumer space.

Web Development Tools

Details: Written by Stan Coplan, Contributing Editor

Neat Development Tools for the Web

{A little over 2 years ago Adobe systems bought Macromedia and added their Flash software to an already impressive repertoire of applications. Since then, there has been much discussion regarding what direction Adobe would take with this very popular development platform. Contributing Editor Stan Coplan adds his thoughts and expands on the web development tools sector for 2008. ed}

If you were worried about what Adobe would do with Macromedia's Flash and other tools fear not. Thermo is on the way. Will Thermo replace Flash? From what I can tell the answer is no. Thermo will produce output that feeds Flex Builder. Flex Builder is an Adobe programming tool used to produce the SWF files that play in flash. Thermo will take your layered Photoshop files as input and produce MXML (XAML) output for use in Flex Builder. MXML and XAML and similar XML formats are used to describe a user interface (UI) in a human readable but very structured format.

As part of the conversion process it is easy to transform a text field from Photoshop into a text-input field for Flex Builder. In fact there are many possible transformations available. This makes it very easy to convert a graphic design directly into a mix of graphics and programming components. So the hand-off from design to programming should be very smooth, much better than what we have available today, if Thermo lives up to its promise. It’s possible that MXML and XAML will replace CSS, and the browser will become a container for Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight. Of course, that could all be changed by new products like Adobe AIR that bridge the desktop-web divide.

Mergers & Acquistions, Software and SaaS

Details: Written by Amy Wohl, Contributing Analyst

2008 Promises to be a Lively Year in Software

M&A: Mergers and Acquistions

Already, it’s gotten off to a tumultuous start in the M&A area with Microsoft’s hostile offer to purchase Yahoo for $31 per share in cash and stock, originally worth about $44.6 billion (worth somewhat less now, in a falling stock market). Yahoo has been looking (unsuccessfully, we think) for a white knight. Most knights don’t have $50 Billion plus horses. So we suspect Microsoft will slightly sweeten the deal – financial analysts suggest to $35 per share – and take the prize. The question is what they’ll do with it.

Directions 2008

Details: Written by Brad Pransky, Editor

How we see 2008

Traditionally we have always done a ‘Predictions’ piece sometime just before year’s end. In it we take our crystal balls firmly in hand, don our silicon turban and prognosticate on the future of various aspects of the tech industry.

This year we didn’t.

We just weren’t seeing anything that exciting on the horizon and we made an editorial decision to wait until after the first salvo of trade shows to see if there was something we were missing and go from there. Well we’ve had 6 weeks or so to settle into 2008, take a deep breath and scope out the industry.

There are some exciting things happening, such as the bid by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo and the ever improving and proliferating tools to put more and more and more (and more) content on the web. To that end, we have asked two of our resident wizards, Analyst Amy Wohl and Contributing Editor Stan Coplan to give us their take on the areas of mergers and acquisitions, SAAS (software as a service), and all those neat development tools for the web. All that being said, as far as hardware is concerned, I still feel that 2008 will be….

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