Special Report: 5.28.2009

Posted by TED Magazine on Thursday, May 28, 2009

LEDs: Not Ready for Prime Time?

By Joe Salimando

LightFair alternates between Las Vegas and New York. I attend the NYC editions of the show, every two years, because I’m “at home” in the city of my birth, and also because I keep leaving heaps of money on certain tables in Vegas.

A major reason to go is that lighting is major source of technological change in the electrical industry. It’s interesting! And there is (for someone who is not Craig DiLouie) an unending opportunity to learn.

Lightfair 2009 had a lot to teach someone like me. One of the things I learned, to a great deal of dismay and personal agita, was about LEDs.

 

 
Above: The Cree booth at LightFair bubbled over with people every time I walked by, including this one.

 

Background

First, some personal biases. A pessimist by nature, your humble reporter does keep hope alive. Sure, we Americans waste energy, but we will substitute LEDs for all kinds of lighting in the next 20 years and save big.

Why not get started now?

Plus, in my opinion, the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) is awful. I’ve previously detailed my personal experience with CFLs. While in NYC, I listened as a friend who is not in the electrical industry (without prompting) excoriated the quality of light the things emit.

[Note: My friend is not poor, so it isn’t the “cheap” CFLs that gave him problems. However, he is a reader. Is it possible that people who read newspapers, magazines, and books have more difficulty with CFLs than, say, people who do not read?]
 

 
LEDs as White Knight

If you don’t like CFLs and you abhor energy waste, then LEDs are the potential savior—the White Knight of the 2010s and 2020s.

They offer all kinds of potential:

1. They should use less energy than even CFLs.
   
   
2. As a lighting source for readers, they could offer light quality as good (or better?) than the wasteful incandescent.


3. While they are very expensive right now, the promise is that they will get cheaper over time. It’s a neat shadow of solar photovoltaics; both products rely on semiconductors.
   
   
4. LEDs promise long lives. Promoters talk about 50,000 hours, 70,000 hours, and even 100,000 hours. For a commercial, institutional, or industrial facility, it’s “fix it and forget it.” The payback from an LED retrofit comes—potentially—in big energy savings and lower maintenance costs.
   
   
5. Beyond all that, there is the potential for lighting design geniuses to use LEDs for new ways of lighting. This isn’t “there” just yet. There were a gazillion light bulb-shaped LEDs on LightFair’s show floor, but these things don’t have to be shaped that way. The first fruits of the revolution come in that form because there are 4 billion sockets out there in the United States that take screw-in bulbs.
   

To my knowledge, before this year’s LightFair, LEDs had a couple of problems:

1. The cost. How fast would it come down?
   
   
2. Industry change. A significant new light source that doesn’t need to be replaced frequently especially threatens the electrical distribution industry. Our business model is going to break if LEDs succeed. It won’t happen right away, but sooner or later, all of those replacement fluorescents we sell could vanish. And with them, perhaps, a significant percentage of the industry’s dollar volume.
   

How many replacement light bulbs are sold annually? I honestly don’t know, but I saw data (in a presentation from Willard Warren) claiming 115 million replacement T-12 lamps were sold in 2008.

100,000 Hours or Bust? Then Bust

I stayed for 60 minutes of a 90-minute presentation titled “100,000 Hours of Life and Other LED Fairytales,” by Dr. John Curran, president of LED Transformations. I had to miss the final segment due to another appointment, but I did review all 101 slides. Here’s the content of slide No. 99:

 

 

 

Curran is a fun speaker. His initial remarks were of this nature: “I’m not anti-LED, but you’re going to think I am in a little while.” This was accurate. If this person is NOT against the LED, I’d like to see what someone who really hates these things could do.

On his company’s website, on this case study page, item No. 3 reads: 

An LED lighting distributor provided us with some sample products that he had received from a couple of different manufacturers. We performed photometric, thermal, and electrical tests on the products. Based on our test data, none of the products met the manufacturers’ published specifications. He was then able to make a decision not to carry these products on his line card because they didn’t meet his quality standards.

Early in his presentation, Curran made the point that these items are promoted to last 100,000 hours, but the warranties typically are for...90 days. This line drew a nervous giggle from his audience. In retrospect, it isn’t funny.

There was a lot in his presentation. Let’s deal with a few things:

Driving Off the LED Road

Curran noted that LEDs are supplied in a package. Suppliers sell you an LED light source, which they make, along with a driver (a semiconductor), which they do not make.

Yes, he said, the LED light source could well last 100,000 hours. But the driver could blow out after, maybe, 6,000 hours. His words (to an audience composed primarily of lighting designers/specifiers) conjured up visions of very unhappy customers.

My vision was worse. What will happen to distributors and contractors who sell/install LEDs that burn out in just a few thousand hours? Would the end-user really assassinate a lighting specifier? Or would he/she/it turn his cannon on the installer and/or the ultimate seller of the damn things?

I think you already know the answer.

Costs

I was not in attendance when slide No. 98 was splashed on the screen. The slide shows DOE estimated cost figures, from a table presented at an ENERGY STAR meeting. According to the last line, in 2015, the cost per k-lumen will be $2.

Curran’s in-red note (the underlining is his, too) on this slide:

Last time I checked, a 60W incandescent does not cost anywhere near $1.70.

Certification & Verification

Another dismal note was on the veracity of 100,000-hour claims. The technology keeps advancing, of course. No one, Curran said, has tested a fleet of LED light sources for 100,000 hours.

Think about it. There are 168 hours in a week. To “prove” something will last 100,000 hours, you’ve got to turn it on, and leave it on, for more than 595 weeks. No one, Curran said, is waiting 10-plus years to test an LED product before putting it on the market (and making 100,000-hour claims).

Standards are another sticking point. A performance standard, finally agreed-upon last fall (apparently after mucho arm-waving and finger-pointing), requires testing of these things for 6,000 hours. It was finalized in October 2008, Curran said, and (here it is again)...6,000 hours have not yet gone by.

Further, the problem with this (LM-80) standard is that it requires manufacturers to extrapolate from the 6,000-hour test to make a legit claim for the LED light source’s ultimate life.

Unfortunately, Curran noted, there is a significant amount of disagreement about how exactly one would do that! Is that really a surprise?

Finally, he of course discussed CALiPER testing. This is a series of tests of LED light sources conducted by the Department of Energy. Learn all about them here; see some related DiLouie comments, too. When tested by the government, LEDs are—pretty routinely, at this point—not meeting the claims of their manufacturers.

  

Above: If you’re ever going to “talk the talk” about sustainability, you’ve got to do the simple things to “walk the walk”—including (but not limited to) offering show attendees a place to recycle their plastic show badges as they leave.

Confirmation: The Awful Truth

Were Curran’s words of warning valid? I had a chance to check. One of my numerous appointments at the show came with representatives of Future Lighting (a unit of Future Electronics, the electronic distributor) and another from Philips Lumileds. They met with me together.

Future is, if I heard correctly, a master distributor of LEDs from Lumileds. Nominally, this meeting was about telling TED magazine (in the person of me) about what Future and Lumileds were doing together.

Given the opportunity, I steered the conversation toward the content of Curran’s presentation.

To my dismay, the two lighting industry experts sitting there with me told me he was probably right; in fact, maybe he had underplayed the problem a bit. One of them said: 

“I really don’t think a lot of the LED bulbs on this show floor are going to succeed.”

This person was talking about performance, not initial sales. Good grief!

	Joe Salimando of EFJ Enterprises is a consultant, web content provider, and wordsmith based in Oakton, Va. To contact him, call 703-255-1428. See also The EleBlog.
Personal Disclaimer: The appearance of the ambling pachyderm is indicative of the writer’s obsession with elephants, not his political leanings.
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS COLUMN REFLECTS ONLY THE OPINIONS OF ITS AUTHOR AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OR POLICIES OF NAED, TED MAGAZINE, OR THE ADVERTISERS ON THE TEDMAG WEB SITE.