They are cool.. literally.. you know them by name as well as by sight now.. they set the tone in swanky night spots and they let you know you are in a modern place, the adorn cars looking for street cred as well as those so helplessly geeky they only appeal to the efficiency obsessed. When you were a kid they blinked on your hi fi and on the bridge interments on the Millennium Falcon, and they seemed to last forever and glow on the other side of your TV room a bit evilly when you were trying to fall asleep. They made remote controls possible, saving that tired ass trip to the Zenith to change from the Yankees game to Maverick, and for some reason it took years to go from these simple uses to being basically everywhere, but now they almost are, at a time we need them most…
This is real simple math, even if you have been curled up with that remote control for the last 40 years and are a little groggy from when you nodded off when the Star Spangled Banner was ceding to the Test Pattern (remember when we had more channels than programming.. those were the days.). LED’s are 5 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and twice as efficient as Compact Florescent, the ol pigtails that were the last green wave. but to make it even better.. they last longer than both.. more than twice as long as the CFL, and as much as 25 (!) times as long as the Incandescent. http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/lighting-choices-save-you-money They can get hot, but not as hot as the Incandescent, which looses 90% of the power that goes through it to heat.. Once that was the big jump, from natural gas and fire.. in the times of Edison, when the first grid and streetlights were made in lower Manhattan, when the world ceased to be lit only by fire. That heat went somewhere, and it’s fair to say that for instance most of America needs heating sometimes.. but nowhere in America seems to need it all the time.. and think of the tropics.. it’s hot enough without that 100 year old technology blazing away when you have the soda coolers going too in the village general store. The heat is waste, and LED’s might not have it licked completely, sometimes a large part of the bulb is a heat dissipator, but we are now in generation 3 of common electric lighting technology (Sorry Halogen and Halide!) and the savings are starting to come in, as well as the non financial dividends. There have been challenges. For one thing, these LED’s are so space age looking that the light was kind of unnatural. After either 5000 or 2 million years adapted to fire (depending upon who you talk to) we have a hard time giving up on something that is almost hard wired no matter how inefficient. It’s a question of what is called Light Temperature.. comparison to what I think the sun would produce as light quality at different temperatures. The Light of the sun gives us about 5000 kelvin, but that odd green light of old tubular fluorescent is 1500K, the kind you see burning in weird self help meetings in Fight Club. LED could be set at different temps and colors by the gap between the receptors I believe, perhaps oversimplifying, but it was a challenge nonetheless.
Somehow appreciating that, the hot shots at DOE made an X prize, the world’s new solution to intractable scientific problems. The Prize, 10 million smacks, would go to the company or organization that made the light that looked the most like, yup, an incandescent. We gave 10 Million Taxpayer dollars to the research entity who could best bend the future of lighting back to our past of fire.. http://www.lightingprize.org/ it may seem, well, a bit, a bit like a dim bulbed idea (couldn’t resist) but the DoE under the late days of the Bush administration and then Obama’s Nobel Prize winning professor turned Secretary Stephen Chu (luckily his boss got one soon after his appointment so it didn’t throw off cabinet meeting dynamics) there was a burning, not just light emitting, desire to get the country en mass to adopt this new technology, since a vast majority of our electric energy was and still is produced by Fossil Fuels with their attendant Climate Issues, and even so called clean sources like dam’s have issues, and since lighting accounts for some 20ish % of all US electric use across commercial and residential demand, and perhaps a bit lower in Industrial (and likely a greater proportion of world demand). If you can cut demand by 50% or 80%, you just chopped global warming emissions and a boat load of other issues by a sizable percentage, maybe 10% barring growth in demand if everyone switched over.. Unfortunately, there is this phenomenon.. when we save, we take a bit more. I have two good friends who work in big carbon saving industries, one is large scale solar installing, and one in Forestry, and they both seem to fly a heck of a lot more than anyone I know. We see our highest use as the base line, and we tend to use more when we save. I drive more now that I have a hybrid, because I feel a bit liberated by it, a bit less guilty. There have been similar effects in LED’s.. they are cool, not just physically, but cool looking. I will reference the Santa Monica Ferris Wheel. Since the pier was rebuilt and reopened as a fun park again after years of destruction and neglect familiar to Fletch fans, in 1995 it has been solar powered in some way or form, so it has a good legacy of eco-Karma, but when they rebuilt it in 2008, they, yup, added 160,000 LED’s. it’s pretty cool.. you an see it all the way down to Palos Verdes and up to the end of Malibu if there is no fog.
They are computer controlled and seem to never repeat the same patter twice. It somehow has come hand in hand with a new art style, which is heavy with LED’s. A few years back I was bumming around Dog Town and was invited to join a crew at the beach around the pie for a light festival.. almost every instalation had one thing in common.. LED’s. http://glowsantamonica.org/ but keep going back with this.. Glow Santa Monica seemed to be to be an outgrowth of Burning Man, along with things like Coachella, and Burning Man’s using LED’s seemed to come from the rave scene using glow sticks and LED’s from Ibiza to South Beach, and this brings us all the way back to the joint ideas of electronics and mood lighting.. and all this seems like almost a dividend of the investment in more efficient energy.. so even if we are perhaps taking back a bit of the savings for fun, all work and no play can make jack a dull boy. A latest outgrowth seems to be in Automobiles. When I was a kid, headlights, the eyes of the car, seemed kind of dull.. a bit impassively sinister as Steven King deduced.. in the 90’s halogens came out, and night driving started to seem like a Swedish safety innovation, coolly intense:
but the eyes were beady, no matter how many plastic angles they put in there to change it up. the new trend, so expensive that is has been filtering down from the super car Audi’s of the world is to give these car’s LED eyebrows, and in some cases, LED headlights, as has been an innovation of the off road world and the aviation community:
But these are all on the fringes of the big usage.. the eggheads and the hippies in Californ-I-A don’t for a world change make, and ol Henry Chu knows that.. if the world is gonna really change back to the clean skies when ‘those were the days’, Archie Bunker himself needs to buy in and not see this as a socialist Obamaplot to change radio frequencies to make him infertile.. it needs to work for Joe Sixpack and Joe the Plumber, notoriously risk averse in the agriculture based societies of what are now known as “the red states” to contrast them from the allegedly more risk taking partying under the crystal glow city boys in those coastal areas with less to loose.
Is that happening?
Well, a bit.. the logic seems to be appealing, and more importantly, the price is coming down. I did some field research in a little place called Home Depot in a city called Ft. Wayne Indiana.. fascinating place.. people actually shop there (I kid) and I had a conversation with the display manager while I picked up a grill/smoker that would single handedly double global warming’s impact ( I must deserve it somehow!). This was in the summer of 2014, and things were happening quick, and I had been watching it, because all summer I had been in one of Home Depot’s competitors almost weekly.. a place known as Loews, and I had seen the increasing number of options arrive, even in weeks. I asked him what was going on, and he said he wasn’t sure the price had bottomed out yet, but that there were so many new products coming out that he had to change the display almost every other week to accommodate the new variants in light temperature, intensity, and socket size. There was beginning to be competition even in obscure bulbs, like driveway lights and weird fittings that go under counters and porches.. some of the challenges remained.. bright ones were way expensive and the price went up directly relative to how many LED’s were in the bulb, unlike with CFL’s and incandescents where the bulb held it’s price and you just added a bit more or less filament or material to make it brighter or darker, yellower or whiter. But if you played with them, you found that something marked 40 w equivalent seemed to be as bright as a 100 watt bulb in the same place, and that it took experimentation to get it right, and that experimentation often lead to buying less expensive options that did work as well. And there were improvements in quality. A daylight bulb would flood a space with such a brilliant light that it felt like a museum space, and the walls would pop and the wood grain jump out at you.. it started to feel like a pleasure to do laundry (not that I do laundry.. I am never in any one place long enough to do more than just buy new clothes and burn the dirty ones in buckets of crude oil.. hey, I write about the environment, I earned it!). There are so many companies making LED’s now, from car accessories and airplane parts to city lighting as I discussed in my Dark Sky Movement Piece that the price has been coming down, but it’s fair to say that it can’t come down to where Incandescents are because there is so much more material there, it’s more complex, but I have seen them in end cap displays (it makes me cringe that I know commercial lingo…) well under 10 American dollars. And they might last 30 years.
People just have to do the math, and many are doing it.. for one thing, they Gub’ment acted.. they banned incandescents a few years ago.. people hoarded them like they are hoardin’ 22 ammo today… although you can still find vintage bulbs, so they exist on the shelves if you look. I don’t like being told what to do any more than you do, but they acted, kind of. The administration trying to drive coal out of business (yes they are trying to do it, and it might be a good thing) seems to have made the price of electricity go up, as have high energy prices in general due to instability in places like the middle east and maybe some unseen hand of cartelling that even the best minds at the Wall Street Journal can’t seem to find. It has helped the math even as we do domesticate more and more of our energy demand with the huge fields opened in the first part of this decade in places like Utah and North Dakota. And even as it goes down, all seem to agree the weather is wackier and wackier, and that impression is filtering in.
Now how long will it be before this all has to happen again? there are likely plenty of farmers who remember installing CFL’s in their barns ten years ago, and are wondering when the payback will come.. it took 90 years to get there, and here we are 20 years later doing at it again.. what if the next big thing comes in 10 years, or 5.. well… I can’t answer that.. better beats best.. but I think the whole lighting world is so focused on LED’s I am not sure what else is out there.. they are making things like the Phillips Hue, that can choose colors of an almost infinite variety and broadcast them from their bulbs.. I still don’t know how it works.. it’s like a bright color wheel. I wonder what will happen if new TV technologies come over to lighting, and things like the OLED, the organic LED that saves a few extra watts by using biological matter to create colors..
I hate to have to ask the farmer to change his lights again to this, but maybe this is where it’s going.. it’s flat, and it’s expensive, but if you find yourself in a Best Buy (winter is long where I live now.. I used to avoid all big boxes.. now it sounds like I live in them!) you know it looks really cool!
Wherever it goes, we know where it has gone, and it’s so much better that given the global crisis occurring (trying not to be a bummer.. keep watching the happy box!) it’s hard to not at least advocate that you switch as you go, as things burn out, replace them.. trying to be light about it, but there is a lot riding on it..
About 8 years ago I had the chance to go to two U2 shows.. U2 rerpresents this new kind of melding of art and consumerism.. let’s call it LED optimism.. we are just a few consumer choices away from Utopia it implies. I know they used to be punk and raw, back during the troubles and when Dublin was still poor and gritty, but Bono lives on Central Park West now, he’s got bills to pay.. the show was great, I can’t lie.. even if I don’t want them to have a place in my heart because I hear them blasting out of Lexus’s of people who then absent mindedly cut me off while checking their texts and stocks, they do, because their music is that good. I was entraced at the shows by these hanging strings of LED’s that they had turned into screens.. it was kind of amazing.. what also struck me was at some point during the show, Bono had everyone hold their phones up in the air to text and raise money for some such nonsense like ending world hunger (sheesh.. get to the hits if you have any!) and I was amazed.. when I was a kid, it would have been lighters. but here it was, yuppie power, and it was strangely beautiful.. I wrote in my 787 piece about how the Republican controlled US Congress has stymied every attempt to fight global warming that isn’t voluntary or consumer based, so again, this is where we are left.. indulge them but do it while making even more money.. U2 kind of represent this new LED future.. They do huge tours every few years, always epitomized to me by them stopping in Mexico City where they are revered, as kind of Men from the Future, bringing such an extravaganza of light and accessible emotion that you can’t help but be a little impressed..
Enjoy it.. remember it costs something, but it costs less in the long run..
I am writing from a decidedly un-Christmasy culture.. They aren’t Christians, 97% of them anyways, and they aren’t that consumeristic, although that is changing (spreading like a flower scented cancer from the malls of the capital city)… but they aren’t my readers in any large measure I would guess either, and my readers are staring down the barrel of a loaded ‘fun gun’ called ‘Christmas in America’ right about now. I get it, I grew up with it, I wanted my Red Rider BB Gun once, and I felt no shame in the filthy orgy of misinterpreted Christianity and greed it was…it was fun, some of the presents did change my life and the life of my family and friends for the better, and it was one of the only times of the year that anything approaching reverence crept into the cocky wreck we called a family. And I get the Christianity part too.. I took it quite seriously for a while…and I like to think that my now South Park version of Jesus would be kind of shrugging with amused chagrin at it all…
So my defense of Christmas aside… it’s fair to say that something much maligned as ‘Consumerism’ is a main driver of many of our Environmental woes. It’s ‘consumerism’ when other people do it…. when we do it, it’s the Christmas Spirit… I ain’t casting stones… but all this buying stuff, stuff beyond food and basic necessities, a nice example of how adaptive and successful our cultures have been, is really screwing things up in the planet department, in general (again, no pointed fingers… we cool? We cool…). One huge example is electronic goods. I am pretty sure although you don’t need one to survive, they don’t issue them to Buddhist Monks, that your nose is buried in some light producing screen spitting out info-tainment as we speak… in fact, I can almost guarantee it… There are perhaps 2 billion of the things, maybe more, for a population of 7 billion… and they take a lot of resources to both produce and run… just think about that.. 2 Billion Computers, when you could count them on your hands after World War II. They came into my house, perhaps at Christmas, as a way for us to keep up with a trend… this was the early 80’s. They were cumbersome and labor intensive ( We had a Texas Instruments) but you could smell something amazing was happening…
I watched the first MTV video from a spot on the carpet where we used to plug the TI into the TV, next to the spot where we dragged the phone to drop onto the modem… Media was coming on strong.. The First MTV Video: Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
Imagine the combo of these three instruments I was crawling behind the TV to make work by unplugging the VCR (the Fourth) and plugging in the TI… You don’t have to imagine it, it’s 2 billion strong…. and you are nose into one now… how did I know?! Now when this all first started to happen, it was the Government using these huge IBM mainframes to do what at the time were considered huge calculations.
These things needed their own Power Plants.. then Cray Supercomputers helped us refine the Nuclear Age (so last century!) and perhaps the energy demand was dropping, but it was well past affordability for the householders of the world. Then the personal computer came in, and made it easy to do so many things, from Skyping relatives across the world for Christmas, to making Christmas plans, to shopping for said Christmas, to even getting directions to the relatives in Jersey, where you have to go for Christmas even though you hate to, so you used to print them out because you always intentionally forget the confusing route, and now your phone just tells you… All that computing, it takes energy… http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html like a brain needs vitamin B to keep up with the endless stimulation (Anyone want to get a Pizza?.. they have Christmas specials! Reindeer Sausage and Red and Green Peppers!). Multiply it by two Billion, and the energy demands likely exceed those of some large fraction of the smallest countries on earth ( I am guessing.. it’s Christmas, I don’t want to do the math… but imagine an average of say just 100 watts per computer, x 2 billion… agh… moving on…). You can imagine the demands this places on energy grids, and we all know that unless you live in Iceland, your grid is doing something bad… heck, even in Iceland, you flood valleys to get 3/4 of your power, so let’s make it a blanket statement. The US only get’s 20% of it’s grid power from non carbon sources, and they still have environmental consequences and costs in production, so yeah, your computer, it’s doing something somewhere, as we speak, unless you are powered by solar, and planted a tree and remedied a rare earths mineral mine to cover your footprint.. The idea of coal is a double whammy on Christmas (My jerk sister used to love to stuff it in my stocking, just to let me know what Santa might be too nice to say…) so I won’t bring up that depressing subject, but you better live in Hawaii or maybe Puerto Rico to not think you aren’t getting some juice from it in the collective right now. So let me bring up a guy named Steve Jobs… he’s no longer as concerned about his legacy I would guess.. because he’s dead… if you didn’t know, you must not own a computer, so I will assume you do. The guy was no Jesus, he was a businessman… He made addictive little contraptions, and leveraged insecurity, pretension, and a love of media to make money selling them to you. Bill Gates, who is still alive, did something a bit different.. he might have had less ideas, but he had some slightly more Utopian visions, no matter how much the marketing of Mr. Jobs was swaddled in Utopianism.. and is now spending his days of idly pursuing a sainthood of sorts. Those of you on a more modern Version of Windows wish he was as obsessive as Jobs, because Windows sucks without Gates there to supervise, but this accentuates my point that although no saint, Steve Jobs was the ever acclaimed perfectionist and made a good product. His single minded pursuit left something else by the wayside too… the Environment.. which is why he will seem an unlikely hero in a few lines. Maybe it is just the scrutiny it gets from it’s ultra hip bloggy mc-graduate degree customers (although mac’s increasing popularity is watering that gene pool down a bit these days.. yup, your tacky housewife cousin who Facebook posts too many pics of her kids has one… the sorority girl.. yup.. her), but Mac might have come in a lot of colors, but very few, Jobs included, saw it a green. They got Flack for not pushing for recyclable or sustainable materials, and more flack for the pollution caused by it’s Southern China factories and the methods used to extract and refine metals used in it’s production. He was single minded in pursuit of sales, and if that collaterally led to greenness, he was all for it, but it is my assumption that Jobs didn’t want to get side tracked by making bamboo and banana leaf computers when that in and of itself would have required a pretty huge and un-demanded investment. But, with market demand, he did start another revolution, a word I begrudgingly use because it used to make me cringe whenever the Beatles Song of the same name was blasphemed from it’s sacrosanctity by being used in his campaigns to sell his idiot boxes with extra buttons… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXhtFik-vI sorry, it was Nike, but same difference to some of us.. anyhow, so I am about to describe something that will seem small.. it is small, but multiply it by 2 billion, and it isn’t so small. Let’s start by describing how it was small in a good way. I am talking about the IPad… what it is, is a solid state computer, and by solid state I mean no moving parts. it’s magic is that it’s just a series of circuits.. it’s somehow our privilege that Planck’s Constant gave us RAM that could be hand portable without ROM before the guy who knew what to do with it died… make it snazzy and give it a really nice touch screen. If the last sentence went past your head, this one will make sense to anyone who passed high school physics or pays attention to plugs or their electric bill. These Tablets that Steve Jobs introduced, because they have no moving parts, use something like 1/10 of the energy of their recent predecessors. I’m talking about Tablets, which were led by the Ipad, the newest incarnation of the Computer Revolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9qbgQdAxls
This was under 4 years ago, and I would have to guess that IPad’s and their new derivatives, the Tablets, number in the hundreds of millions today. I had one for a bit.. a good buddy made me get one so I could communicate easily during a trip abroad. Addictive little thing. I had to literally destroy it to go cold turkey. It didn’t brake easily either ( I was literally in a war zone, so shooting it like Elvis would have been pretty dramatically misinterpreted by the soldiers guarding my hotel.) I had to bounce it against about 4 walls (making NEWS: North, East, West, South) because it was so solid state. Before that act, I could literally never disconnect from my wired state.. I could wipe and keep watching The Daily Show at the same time without even putting it down.. I don’t know how to explain it’s power better than that… Jobs was plunging his system deep into my psyche, and pulling cash out as well…which didn’t escape the observations of the South Park Guys: http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e01-humancentipad But my addiction aside, let’s go back to the whole solid state thing again… Remember hard drives? They spun.. they moved.. the required power to do so, and Desktops… they had a big ol’ TV attached to them.. must have used 50-100 watts or more…gone…now even mouses are obsolete.. not that they used much power.. they were, well, mouse-like, dainty in their consumption… but now, again.. obsolete with the touch screen, well, credit to the touch pad, but still an investment and a power user… but the touch screen? the coffin is sealed… So right before my NEWS incident, I left my charger behind in a major city.. like cars before the gas crisis, I had never really wondered how much power they used because it never was an issue.. no one thinks about efficiency in computers.. we need them too badly to question them…we take what they give us… but Jobs, in his pursuit of something better.. the reliability and hand held possibilities of a tablet, not to mention the battery life possible in 2010 (the beginning of the age of Lithium) addressed this problem without us even knowing it.. Where I was looking for Ipad Chargers, I was in the land beyond them.. the city I had just left, was a city of 3 million, and had two mac outlets.. I went into a province with no paved roads leading to it, but due to the miracles of the Cell phone and cheap Chinese crap being everywhere, I could buy IPhone chargers there.. it created about half the charge, but it was enough to trickle charge my IPad.. now the big moments.. how much does an IPhone charge on.. 5 watts… the Ipad.. about 10… 10 watts.. no, not 10 kilowatts, which might have been what the first plasma screens needed.. There are clock radios that run on more than 10 watts, and they sure as heck don’t do what this thing can.. it’s pretty amazing.. and it uses next to no power.. it runs on about 2.5 watts http://techlogg.com/2011/03/qa-whats-ipad-2s-power-consumption/2322 that’s an almost negligible amount of power.. there were too many things to sell it on to have this be a selling point… to even talk about power consumption almost breaks that magic.. implies limitations and weakness.. Jobs might have been right to never mention it.. but he has launched a revolution for real.. This whole commercialism thing that is slowly sinking the planet… there are two routes out… Luddite solutions (make some NEWS!) and innovation… efficiency was an afterthought here, but if you do the math, every minute that you are curled up with your IPad in bed instead of sitting in front of your desktop or laptop, you are saving the planet, relatively…. and any time you ask a question of your IPhone instead of your laptop or desktop.. again.. triple bonus points.. unless you have it sitting asleep but on all the time, waiting to be cranked up if the tablet or phone stops entertaining you… then you suck!
I wonder how many hours it takes to get past the environmental costs of the production of that devious little Monolith (My god.. it’s full of stars!) and be in the black on power usage… you could run it for over 2000 hours without incurring 1 dollar’s charge on your power bill, in California where energy costs are the highest in the Contiguous US states by some rough math. And the world has followed suit.. Samsung and Asus and now Chromebooks are all essentially IPad variants.. no moving parts but the buttons, using 1/10 if not 1/40th or 1/100th of the power of the device they replace… So since Santa and Jesus made peace, consume away if it brings these kinds of (relative) savings.. not Black Friday savings, but black coal savings.. leaving it in the ground and not in the environment, from China to Charlestown, WV! ….. wait.. you didn’t watch that.. it was literally the first South Park even made by Parker and Stone as film Students at UC Boulder.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSQczYEeB2w watch guilt free.. on a tablet, of course… you info-tainment gobbling consumer.. just don’t shoot yer eye out! Oh and… there might even be innovations in the big screen category to come, just in case you can’t give it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED http://www.oled-info.com/flexible-oled Merry Christmas Every One!
