To my unpleasant surprise, I recently discovered that my television no longer works! Then I remembered that earlier this year the UK finally completed the transition from old analogue television signals to digital. A similar process is also taking place in the way we light our homes.
The familiar, but wasteful, incandescent bulb is being taken out of production as part of the European environmental agenda. By about 2015 they will probably be out of production altogether. So what does this mean for us?
Well, looking for a replacement bulb now is probably a good idea. That is if you don't want to be placed in the same position as I was with my television. You might one day turn around and discover that the only place you can buy an incandescent bulb is in an antiques shop. In the near future you can expect to see a lot more homes using energy efficient LED Lighting. The residential expansion of LED Lighting will also see a marked drop in the price of an LED Bulb.
According to VantagePoint Capital Partners, the price of LED Lighting could drop by up to 90 percent by 2015. Efficiency policies in America, which plan to eliminate all 100-watt incandescent bulbs by the year 2012, will open up a much larger share of the $40 billion a year global lighting market to LED manufacturers.
Of the 2.7 billion bulbs used in the US last year, about 1.7 billion of those were incandescent. At present LED Lighting only constitutes 1 percent of the existing market, but within the next 5 years this is expected to grow to more than 50 percent. That means over a billion LED Bulbs will be entering homes across the US.
The GU10 LED are already showing positive trends as it has become one of the most popular like-for-like replacements for halogen and incandescent bulbs. A typical incandescent bulb loses about 90 per cent of its energy as wasted heat. LED Lights convert almost all of their energy into useful light. They also last a lot longer. A typical LED Light Bulb will last 10 or 20 times longer than a regular incandescent.
So what do we think? Will the price of an LED Bulb drop within the next three years, or are we being too optimistic? It has to be remembered that a lot of the cost benefit of an LED Bulb is calculated overtime. The combined energy savings and reduced replacement costs mean that even if you pay a little more than an LED Bulb they will put money back in your pocket overtime.
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