Published: June 3, 2011
Over the past few years, in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb. The prototype they’ve developed is four inches tall, with a familiar tapered shape, and unlighted, it resembles a neon yellow mushroom. Screw it in and switch it on, though, and it blazes with a voluptuous radiance. It represents what people within the lighting industry often call their holy grail, an invention that reproduces the soft luminance of the incandescent bulb — Thomas Edison’s century-old technology — but conforms to much higher standards of energy efficiency and durability. The prototype is supposed to last for more than 22 years, maybe as long as you own your house, so you won’t need to stock up at the supermarket. And that’s fortunate, because one day very soon, traditional incandescent bulbs won’t be available in stores anymore. They’re about to be effectively outlawed.
As a consumer product, light bulbs belong to what one industry executive calls a “low-thought category,” and yet, of late, they’ve become a surprising flash point. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh have denounced the “light-bulb ban” — actually, a new set of federal efficiency regulations that the traditional incandescent can’t meet — as a symbolic case of environmentalist overreaching, and Michele Bachmann invoked it in the Tea Party’s response to the State of the Union. Wherever your political sympathies lie, you may have found yourselves nodding along with Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who has lambasted the harsh glare given off by those “little, squiggly, pigtailed” compact fluorescents. When it comes to making light, a fundamental necessity of human civilization, libertarians and aesthetes are joined in an unlikely alliance. Environmental groups say the complainers are a cranky minority — that consumers will eventually get used to new light — but those in the illumination business can’t afford to be so sanguine. And that is why, inside a drab Silicon Valley office building belonging to a company called Lumileds, some of the industry’s most brilliant minds are plumbing the mysteries of light on an atomic level, working to devise the bulb of the future.
Lumileds, a subsidiary of the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips Electronics, specializes in the manufacture of light-emitting diodes (L.E.D.’s), tiny semiconductor chips similar to the ones you’d find within your computer, except that they turn electricity into photons instead of information. Behind the walls of the company’s hermetically clean manufacturing facility, technicians wearing white jumpsuits, puffy caps and rubber gloves work at enormous humming reactors, combining various gases at 1,000 degrees centigrade to “grow” the crystalline substance that forms the critical element of L.E.D.’s.
Philips created its L.E.D. bulb to compete for the L Prize, a government-sponsored award meant to encourage the development of a replacement for the 60-watt incandescent before the new standards begin to go into effect in January. Traditional incandescents are extremely inefficient, giving off 90 percent of their energy as heat, not light, and over the years, the government and the lighting industry tried to move consumers on to products like halogens and compact fluorescents. But no amount of subsidy or “green” branding has managed to woo consumers away from Edison’s bulb. “Not only is it in alignment with the type of light that consumers like,” says David DiLaura, author of “A History of Light and Lighting.” “It’s commoditized and it’s cheap.”
So some years ago, Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards. “We felt that we needed to make a call, and show that the best-known lighting technology, the incandescent light bulb, is at the end of its lifetime,” says Harry Verhaar, the company’s head of strategic sustainability initiatives. Philips told its environmental allies it was well positioned to capitalize on the transition to new technologies and wanted to get ahead of an efficiency movement that was gaining momentum abroad and in states like California. Other manufacturers were more wary, but they also understood the downside to selling a ubiquitous commodity: the profit margin on a bulb that sells for a quarter is negligible. After much negotiation, the industry and environmental groups agreed to endorse tightening efficiency by 25 to 30 percent.
A bipartisan bill passed Congress with little notice in 2007, but protests have mounted as the phaseout nears, and lighting companies need to prove to the public that efficient products can also be easy on the eye. “The morality of the global threat” is one way to push people toward more-efficient lighting, Verhaar says. “But I think that a larger number of people are going to be mobilized based on the lighting benefits.”
“Roughly three-quarters of the four billion light sockets in the United States still have this inefficient, 130-year-old product,” says Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the N.R.D.C. Filling those billions of sockets represents not just a technological challenge but also an opportunity the industry hasn’t encountered since Edison first flipped a switch.
The notion of
light as a thoughtless commodity would have seemed fanciful to our distant ancestors. Before electricity, light was expensive, a product of exhaustible sources like whale oil. It was Edison who finally took it to the masses in limitless quantities. On Dec. 31, 1879, the inventor invited a crowd of thousands to his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., to witness a demonstration of his fantastic innovation, described in a patent as an “electric lamp for giving light by incandescence.” Building on the experimentation of others, Edison had devised a practical method for generating illumination by running a current through a rudimentary filament — a carbonized strip of cardboard — encased inside a vacuum-sealed glass bulb. When the inventor lighted the lamp, it glowed orange, “like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn,” a contemporary newspaper said.
Almost immediately, though, there were complaints. Some detractors saw electric light as unnatural and reddish, lacking the comforting attributes of a gas flame. But with further refinements — the cardboard filament was replaced by bamboo, and later tungsten — quality improved. At first, bulbs were fairly expensive: in 1891, one went for 44 cents, more than $10 when adjusted for inflation. But Edison accurately predicted that costs would plummet as electricity vanquished all competing technologies.
After that, advancement in home lighting more or less came to a halt. A century ago, incandescent lamps with tungsten filaments lasted about 1,000 hours (same as today’s), were only slightly dimmer and sold in the familiar varieties of 40, 60 and 100 watts. Edison didn’t worry about how many watts they consumed; after all, he also owned an electric company. Efficiency wasn’t an issue until the energy crisis of the 1970s, which inspired compact fluorescents, but they went over poorly and never made much of a dent in the incandescent’s market domination.
The compact fluorescent’s failings were a matter of price — the first ones sold for $25 to $35 a bulb — and taste. American consumers seem to prefer incandescence, for reasons connected to the science of light. “What we term ‘light’ does not exist without the human eye — it’s just radiation,” says Nadarajah Narendran, a professor at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Your eye is a detector that senses this energy coming to it at different wavelengths.” Those wavelengths are perceived as colors. Natural light combines all the colors of the visual spectrum. When people complain that fluorescent light is cold, what they’re really describing is an overload of radiation at the bluish wavelengths.
“I don’t think it’s cultural; I think it’s much deeper than that, that our reaction to long-wavelength light is warm and short-wavelength light is cold,” David DiLaura says. Humans don’t see all wavelengths equally well; DiLaura says the eye’s “sensitivity curve” is adapted to the spectral composition of light on the African savanna. The light that surrounds us can have psychological and physical effects. Research has suggested that altering wavelengths can affect students’ attention and that patients on the south side of a hospital, which gets more light, recover more quickly than those on the north. So it’s hardly surprising that the incandescent phaseout has prompted a visceral reaction.
Boosters say L.E.D.’s can be calibrated to create light that’s just as good as — maybe better than — natural. They have long been used for low-intensity applications, like the digits on your microwave, but it was only about a decade ago that a cadre of physicists began to awaken the industry to their wider potential. Roland Haitz, a scientist associated with Lumileds, argued that just as computer chips were becoming exponentially more powerful, L.E.D.’s were getting brighter and cheaper at a predictable rate, a proposition now known as Haitz’s Law. Transitioning to L.E.D.’s, Haitz forecast, would cut the amount of electricity used for lighting by more than 50 percent worldwide, eliminating some 200 million tons of carbon emissions a year.
Individual L.E.D.’s come in precise wavelengths — gradations of red, green, blue and so on — and can be combined to appeal to the way the eye assimilates light. Inside Philips’s L Prize bulb, 24 red and blue L.E.D.’s are divided into four quadrants and covered by a curved yellow shell. When they are turned on, they send a stream of red and blue photons through the casing, which contains a phosphor that converts some particles to yellow, and they mix to create white light that looks nearly identical to incandescent. The bulb runs on less than 10 watts of electricity.
Much of the crucial basic research behind the bulb was done by a specialized group of about 40 Lumileds scientists. They continually work to improve the L.E.D. performance by experimenting with the closely guarded “recipe” used to cook up the diodes by combining molecules of indium, gallium and nitrogen. “The material system is not very well understood,” says Ted Mihopoulos, who heads the department. Minuscule changes in temperature inside a reactor can yield significant variations in color and brightness. People sometimes say that L.E.D.’s are like diamonds; no two are exactly alike. When the time came to build an L Prize prototype, Mihopoulos said he culled the 24 brightest diodes from his lab’s private stash.
“The L Prize is the Rolls-Royce,” Christoph Hoelen, one of the bulb’s lead developers, says. “Then the question beyond that is, how do you make a good car that is affordable?” Philips recently brought out the AmbientLED, a clunkier version of its competition design, which Hoelen called his Honda. It incorporates fewer L.E.D.’s and is a bit dimmer and less efficient, but it’s still as bright as a 60-watt incandescent, and it is advertised to last 17 years. The bulb’s affordability is relative, though. At the Home Depot closest to Lumileds, I saw the AmbientLED marked at $39.97.
If Haitz’s Law holds true, that price will come down, but persuading consumers to pay even a fraction of it for a light bulb is going to require a serious marketing effort. “It’s a different sale than we’re used to,” said Ed Crawford, a top executive in Philips’s lighting division. Over lunch at its corporate offices in Somerset, N.J., near Edison’s old lab, Crawford told me he started out with the Philips subsidiary Norelco, retailing electric razors. “The sale is really the same,” he said. “You can buy a razor for a dollar that you can use to shave your face — or you can buy an appliance.” An AmbientLED will last as long as an electric razor, and while that means Philips will be giving up many disposable-bulb sales, the comparatively high prices (and 20 to 30 percent margins) currently prevailing in the L.E.D. marketplace will make the tradeoff extremely profitable, at least in the short term.
The key for the industry will be getting the price below $10, generally considered the magic number for consumers, without compromising quality. Many leading L.E.D. manufacturers doubt that is feasible in the near term and have decided to focus on developing light sources for commercial settings like stores and hotels. With the phaseout, homeowners should initially move to hybrid halogen bulbs, a transitional product that only barely meets the new regulations, and compact fluorescents. But the industry is well aware that the alternatives are polarizing — Crawford said his own wife won’t allow fluorescents into their home — and that’s why so much R. and D. is going into L.E.D.’s and programs like the government’s L Prize.
The prize is $10 million, but the real reward will come in the form of bragging rights and federal procurement contracts. For now, only one other company, the Florida-based Lighting Science Group, has produced a prototype that claims to meet the contest’s stringent performance criteria, and testing is ongoing. “The idea here was, Let’s set a very high standard,” says Senator Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat who was responsible for putting the L Prize program into the 2007 lighting-efficiency legislation.
Switching to new technologies, advocates claim, will save as much electricity each year as is consumed by all the homes in Texas. Opponents of the new regulations, however, question the projected environmental benefits, pointing out that lighting accounts for less than 10 percent of total U.S. energy consumption. In March, Bingaman convened a Senate committee hearing on the new standards. Two Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jim Risch of Idaho, used the occasion to denounce free-market infringement. Paul pressed Kathleen Hogan, a D.O.E. official, to say whether she was pro-choice before going off into a long disquisition on liberty. “I find it really appalling and hypocritical . . . that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb,” Paul said. “I really find it troubling, this busybody nature.”
Later, the committee heard from a panel of experts, including Howard Brandston, a former professor at R.P.I.’s Lighting Research Center. Brandston’s résumé includes everything from theater work to illuminating the Statue of Liberty, but lately he has become the Paul Revere of the movement to save the light bulb, giving speeches to industry conferences and a Tea Party rally in front of the White House. In his testimony, he warned of potential problems with compact fluorescents, which contain trace amounts of mercury. “Some of the most knowledgeable people I know,” Brandston said, “have begun to stockpile a lifetime supply of incandescent lamps.”
A few weeks later, Brandston showed me his own hoard, in the basement of his handsomely lighted farmhouse in upstate New York. “This is the world’s greatest marketing scheme,” he said. “You get the government to ban the competition.” A slight man with an air of gray-bearded grandiloquence, Brandston contends that his root objection to the law, which he calls “immoral,” is connected to his professional appreciation of incandescence, which mimics the natural spectrum. “It’s what we grew up with — it’s sunlight,” Brandston told me earlier on the phone.
Joined by Kevin Simonson, a former student, we went out to Brandston’s garage workshop, where he had set up a spectrometer above a table with three light sockets. Brandston turned on one socket, which contained an incandescent, and a readout appeared on the laptop that was hooked to the spectrometer: a smooth bell curve across the visual spectrum, running from blue on the left to red on the right. Then he switched to a compact fluorescent, and an ugly pattern of spikes appeared. “If you can live with that, O.K.,” Brandston said with a huff. “But what you’ve done is you’ve taken away my choice.”
From my bag I retrieved a Philips L Prize entry, which had been burning agreeably in my office for weeks. Brandston looked at the yellow thing skeptically — he’d told me he considers L.E.D.’s “a fad” — and screwed it into a socket. The bulb gave off a lustrous white light, but the computer readout showed a spectral composition very different from the incandescent’s: a little bit of blue, more green and yellow and a tall peak of red — a combination engineered, according to Lumileds scientists, to the eye’s sensitivities.
“That’s not bad,” Simonson said. But Brandston remained stubbornly unimpressed. “It lacks the vibrancy,” he said, and he began to seek out faults, finding that the bulb took on a sickly green hue when it was dimmed. Anyway, the whole project seemed absurd to him: why create a technological marvel just to reproduce the light we already have? When Brandston turned on the incandescent, he beamed with satisfaction at Edison’s warm and wasteful glow. “Look at that,” he said. “It’s a perfect thing.”
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