Move over CFLs?

Elisabeth Rosenthal and Felicity Barringer write about the coming of LED lighting in the New York Times. I first heard about commercial applications of LED lighting when doing research for my thesis project on green hotels - some of the hotels I talked to were experimenting with LED lighting. While I've know about LED flashlights and camp lights for a long time, their super bright white light seemed ill-suited to room lighting to me. So it's interesting to know that people are really pushing this technology now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/science/earth/30degrees.html?em

Of course, for good reason though. LED lights are much more energy efficient and material efficient than CFL lights - our current standard for greenness. (Scary fact though - normal CFLs are only about 20% efficient.. meaning, only 1W out of 5W that goes to powering your bulb is actually turned into light. The other 4W become waste heat. This of course is also the reason that CFLs are considered green - relative to traditional incandescents, they're amazing since traditional bulbs typically convert no more than THREE percent to light.)

This will be a trend that will be very interesting to follow as time goes on. Especially, as pointed out in the article) money comes on-line from the government to support new technologies like LEDs. Anyone out there come into contact with LED lightbulbs on a regular basis in a commercial setting?