Energy efficiency and conservation: Is solid state lighting a bright idea?

Inês M. Lima de Azevedo, Climate Decision Making Center, Engineering and Public Policy Department, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Keywords

lighting, solid state lighting, time value of money, implicit discount rates.

Abstract

Because lighting constitutes 20 % of total US electricity consumption, and many current lighting technologies are highly inefficient, improved technologies for lighting hold great potential for energy savings and for reducing associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Solid-state lighting (SSL) is a technology that shows great promise as a source of efficient, affordable, color-balanced white light in the near future. Indeed, under a pure engineering-economic analysis, SSL already performs better than incandescent bulbs it is expected that commercial available LEDs to surpass fluorescents within the next decade. However, a large literature indicates that individual household decision-makers (and to a lesser extent commercial decision makers) do not make their decisions using pure engineering-economic evaluations. An analysis for commercial decision-makers and for individual households has been made to compare the cost, electricity consumption, carbon emissions and cost-effectiveness of incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps (compact and tubes) and SSL. The analysis includes a parametric evaluation of the levelized annual cost (LAC) of providing an illumination service for households or commercial consumers similar to the one in place today by replacing incandescent or fluorescent bulbs with SSL bulbs as a function of the changes in electricity consumption, incremental cost and incremental lifetime of the new technology. The analysis accounts for the expected evolution of the main characteristics of SSL between 2007 and 2015. Also, this work has identified a number of fundamental methodological limitations in the adoption and diffusion of new technology clearly deserve more attention in the future.