WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 (UPI) -- A light bulb that lasts 13 years and uses 40 percent less energy than a regular bulb is not science fiction; it's a light-emitting diode. And with it, the city of Raleigh, N.C., is planning to start saving on its energy bill and energy use.
Over the next 18 months, Raleigh and its LED provider, Durham, N.C.-based Cree Inc., plan to install LED fixtures and lights throughout the city's public infrastructure. The project is being called "LED City" by Raleigh and Cree.
LED City is what is being called a "living laboratory," which isn't a research-and-development tool. It's a precursor to what Cree hopes will be a challenge to other cities around the world.
"The project we're working on in Raleigh is what we call a living laboratory, not with laboratory products but real, available commercial products," Cree Chief Executive Officer Chuck Swoboda told United Press International. "If we can show people that it's not just an R&D demo and that it's a real application, then we can start to change, fundamentally, the role LED lights play in the light market."
The first phase of the living lab was to install LEDs on one floor of the Municipal Building parking garage in downtown Raleigh. The other floors were left with traditional lighting fixtures. The LEDs improved the quality of light in the garages, said Raleigh Public Affairs Director Jayne Kirkpatrick. More importantly, it reduced energy consumption in the garage by 40 percent said Progress Energy, Raleigh's electric provider.
Raleigh spends $4.2 million a year to pay for its lighting bill, Kirkpatrick said. Of that sum, $200,000 goes toward lighting the city's parking facilities, she said. To save money, the city plans to continue installing LEDs throughout its public infrastructure. This would include the rest of its garages, its parking lots, street lights (of which Raleigh has 330,000), pedestrian walkways, architectural and landscape lighting, she said.
When all the new LEDs are installed, Kirkpatrick said, Raleigh has conservatively estimated that it would reduce its electric bill by 20 percent, or $830,000.
"That's eight firefighters or eight policeman or 11 police cruisers, or money to run a community center for 10 months," Kirkpatrick said.
Making energy-efficient lighting isn't a new endeavor. Before LED became efficient enough to compete in the lighting market there were fluorescent lights, high-energy discharge lights, halogen lights and compact fluorescent lights. According to Gregory Merritt, Cree's director of corporate marketing, each of these technologies are more energy efficient than regular incandescent bulbs. Cree, however, has put on the market light bulbs that are many times more efficient than these alternatives, Merritt said.
"HID and fluorescent bulbs get 50 to 60 lumens," Swoboda said. "Today we're shipping products with 70-80 lumens per watt and we've already demonstrated 130 lumens per watt in R and D."
The sun produces 40 lumens of light per watt of energy and a regular 100 watt incandescent bulb produces 17 lumens per watt, according to the Georgia State University Department of Physics.
More than just the measure of lumens per watt is the efficiency at which a bulb uses energy. Current on-the-market LEDs are 85 percent energy efficient, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Solid State Lighting Program, which seeks to develop energy-efficient lighting technology and implement it. An incandescent bulb is only between 3 and 10 percent energy efficient, according to the DOE.
Cree points to LEDs as a way to reduce the nation's overall energy consumption and hopes that what happens in Raleigh will lead to what it internally calls "the revolution".
"I think people understand that energy is important and I think that people can sense that there is something they can do, but too often, what," Swoboda said. "People are shocked that a quarter of our energy goes to lighting -- this isn't one of those things we can invent in five years that might work we can do it right now."
The United States could save the energy production of 30 large (more than 1,000 megawatt) power plants a year if all the lights in the country were switched to energy-efficient LEDs, said Next Generation Lighting, a lighting industry alliance that includes Cree as well as other lighting companies such as Phillips and General Electric, that is working with the DOE on the SSL project.
Also switching to LEDs would have an additional environmental impact. Since LEDs only have to be replaced every 13 years, that reduces the amount of wastes in landfills and the amount of materials used in producing lights, Merritt said. Carbon dioxide emissions, which are believed to contribute to global climate change, would be reduced by 155 million tons, Next Generation Lighting said.
The materials used to make LEDs are inert and non toxic, Swoboda said. Unlike sodium-based fluorescent lighting, when LEDs need to be thrown away there isn't a toxic waste issue with disposing of them, he said.
"In the case versus fluorescent when you're done with it putting it into a landfill has its own problems since it has mercury in it -- LEDs don't," Swoboda said. "The strength of our product is that you can have the environmental benefits affordably."
Besides the savings, Raleigh hopes its adoption of LEDs will be an example to the rest of the world.
"I didn't realize what a sizable chunk of energy lighting took up," Kirkpatrick said. "We're very hopeful for our city and the rest of the world that this works."
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