LED Hugger  

I've referred to LED based lighting and its advantages over incandescent lights and fluorescent lights quite a few times in the past. It seems that things are moving along quite swiftly on this front, with TreeHugger posting a slew of reports on the subject lately.

First up, they note there has been a breakthrough in White LED Breakthrough, with reports of a doubling of efficiency.

It seems like the light emitting diode (LED) world is going from one breakthrough to the next. The last one was the accidental invention of warm white LEDs using quantum dots, and now a Japanese researcher at the Meijo University, professor Satoshi Kamiyama, has found a way to make white LEDs more efficient using a purple LED and a silicon carbide substrate. This new white LED has a brightness of 130 lumens per watt! "Normal incandescent light bulbs produce 15-20 lumens per watt; modern fluorescent bulbs produce between 60-110 lumens per watt; and current LED methods allow for a maximum of 60-70 lumens per watt. In short, if this is real, it's a big breakthrough." Professor Satoshi Kamiyama will establish a startup in January to manufacture and sell the LED units.

While LED lighting is functional it can also be used for decoration - TreeHugger also has posts on their use n home decorating and as Christmas lights.

Treehuggers know that the best new source of electricity is conservation- that money invested there beats nuclear, coal, solar and wind. Our local City-owned utility appears to get that- we just exchanged two strings of old incandescent Christmas lights for new LED lights that use 90% less power. Free.

And a final note on LED's - it appears butterflys had this stuff worked out long before we did (another case of - inadvertent - biomimicry ?).

It turns out that the technology that enables high efficiency LED's is not particularly original but was figured out a while back - by butterflies. "When scientists developed an efficient device for emitting light, they hadn't realised butterflies have been using the same method for 30 million years. Fluorescent patches on the wings of African swallowtail butterflies work in a very similar way to high emission light emitting diodes (LEDs).

Moving on from LED's, TreeHugger takes a look at Google's quest to reduce power consumption in its data centres, and the hope that the fruits of this effort will trickle down to the consumer electornics world.

In a similar vein to our previous posts about more efficient CPUs and more efficient software, this TG Daily article tells us a bit about how mega-huge search giant Google battles its ever-increasing thirst for energy. "'Over four years, the power costs of running a PC can add up to half of the hardware cost,' says Google vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle. '[O]ne of the major inefficiency [is] DC power supplies that are typically about 70% efficient but reach 90% at Google.' Hoelzle says that Google is working with component makers to accelerate the time-to-market of more efficient devices, such as motherboards with a smaller number of DC voltage inputs. Other strategies of limiting power losses include more efficient software as well as an effort to improve the physical design layout of a data center". The sooner this reaches "consumer grade" electronics, the better. So much energy is completely wasted right now, we could certainly shut down many coal power plants if only we started to seriously work on that problem.