Current Event: A Bright Idea 9/28

So I was flipping through The NY Times and came across the business section where there was a giant picture of 2 lightbulbs and a caption that read, "A Bright Idea: Build a Better Bulb. Win $10 Million". Due to my interest in the photo I decided to read the rest of the article.


The government is going to give up to $10 million to any company that can revamp the old inefficient 60 watt bulb into a new 'energy-sipping' version of the most popular type of light bulb used in America. The first entrant, Phillips will win if their claims hold up which is a company in the private sector. Although they are trying to develop a energy saving bulb, I doubt they would have done so if there was not a government prize involved that covered all their cost to develop it. I honestly haven't done too much research into Phillips as a company but most companies do not persue projects unless it makes money for their shareholders. Overall, I think that if the government has the money (which I don't believe they do) to spend, then it's great that they are making an effort to create new technology to save energy. I'm wondering though, will this be the only way that new planet friendly technology is going to be created? Must there be some incentive (monetary or regulation) in order to motivate private companies to become more sustainable?


Here's the article out of The New York Times on Thursday September 24, 2009 if you are interested!

Build a Better Bulb for a $10 Million Prize


By ERIC A. TAUB and LEORA BROYDO VESTEL
Published: September 24, 2009
The ubiquitous but highly inefficient 60-watt light bulb badly needs a makeover. And it could be worth millions in government prize money — and more in government contracts — to the first company that figures out how to do it.

Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Philips has developed an LED light bulb that uses one-sixth the energy of a standard 60-watt incandescent bulb.

Right now, that company could be Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. The company announced on Thursday that it had submitted the first entry for the L Prize, an Energy Department contest that will award up to $10 million to the first person or group to create a new energy-sipping version of the most popular type of light bulb used in America.
As the first entrant, Philips will win the prize if its claims hold up. Testing of the Philips lamp will take close to a year to complete as the department independently evaluates the company’s claims.
“Philips is confident that the product submitted meets or exceeds all of the criteria for the L Prize,” Rudy Provoost, chief of Philips Lighting, said in a statement.
The $10 million is almost beside the point. More important, the contest winner will receive consideration for potentially lucrative federal purchasing agreements, not to mention a head start at cracking a vast consumer marketplace.
The L Prize has garnered significant attention in the lighting industry because 60-watt incandescent lamps represent 50 percent of all the lighting in the United States, with 425 million sold each year. The Energy Department says that if all those lamps were LED equivalents, enough power would be saved to light 17.4 million American households and cut carbon emissions by 5.6 million metric tons annually.
For decades, incandescent light bulbs continued to bear a strong resemblance to Thomas Edison’s creations, but new energy standards that go into effect in 2012 — and would effectively outlaw today’s incandescent bulb — have brought about a period of fertile innovation in the lighting industry.
One of the first attempts at greater efficiency was the now-maligned compact fluorescent bulb, but there have also been efforts to modify incandescent technology to conform to the new standard. LED bulbs are now available in stores, but those models have limited output and high prices. A faithful reproduction of an incandescent bulb’s light from an inexpensive and efficient source has been the industry’s ultimate goal.
Philips has delivered 2,000 prototypes of its bulb to the Energy Department for testing. The company says the bulbs meet all the criteria of the contest, which specifies a bulb that reproduces the same amount and color of light made by a 60-watt incandescent bulb, but uses only 10 watts of power. The bulb must also last for more than 25,000 hours — about 25 times longer than a standard light bulb. In a nod to economic concerns, at least 75 percent of the bulb must be made or assembled in the United States.
If the new bulb passes the department’s testing regimen, it will be an even more efficient, longer-lasting lighting device than today’s compact fluorescent bulbs. The department considers the introduction of compact fluorescents, today’s alternative to standard bulbs, to have been a debacle.
At first, the department set no standards for compact fluorescent bulbs and inferior products flooded the market. Consumers rebelled against the bulbs’ shortcomings: the light output from compact fluorescent bulbs was cold and unpleasant, their life was much shorter than claimed, many were large and undimmable, they would not work in cold environments and they contained polluting mercury.
By setting rigorous criteria for the L Prize, the department hopes LED bulbs can avoid a similar fate. That also means rejecting current LED bulbs that can claim some technical similarities, but fall far short of the L Prize’s goals.
“We’ve probably eliminated almost 25 products that were horrible,” said James R. Brodrick, manager of the Solid State Lighting Program of the Energy Department. “We test LED bulbs today that claim on the package that they’re equivalent to 40 watts, but are really like 20-watt bulbs.”
“This will be the most publicly tested bulb ever,” Mr. Brodrick said.
The Philips LED lamp represents “a significant energy savings,” said Nadarajah Narendran, the director of research at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “This has now leapfrogged what C.F.L.’s can do.”
The Energy Department will also award $5 million to the creator of an LED reflector lamp (no entries have yet been made) and a new, “21st-century lamp,” the specifications of which are yet to be defined.
General Electric — along with Philips and Osram Sylvania, one of the world’s biggest lighting suppliers — said that it would introduce a new LED module next month that would make it easier to replace traditional light sources with LEDs. Osram had no comment about its plans.
The first certified products, due in about a year, will not be cheap. Today’s LED-based bulbs cost up to $100 each, and while there is plenty of optimistic talk about reducing that price, a clear path to affordability remains elusive.
To lower the cost, Mr. Brodrick has enlisted 27 utility companies around the country as L Prize partners, with the hope that utility subsidies, along with mass production, will help cut the cost. One such utility, Southern California Edison, will both test the bulbs and offer rebates to consumers, according to Gregg Ander, the company’s chief architect.
“There’s a potential for LED lamps to be much more acceptable to the consumer than compact fluorescents,” Mr. Ander said. He said he expected that eventually, an LED substitute for a 60-watt bulb would cost the same as its compact fluorescent equivalent, factoring in its longer life.
Kevin Dowling, vice president for innovation at Philips Solid State Lighting Solutions, is confident that the LED light bulb can become an affordable option. “Over the long term, we can absolutely get the cost down to the $20 to $25 range,” he said.

My Ecological Footprint 9/27

http://www.myfootprint.org/en/your_results/?id=639053

If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need about 5.02 planets!
The consumption category that contributes the most to my Footprint is the Food footprint. This is not surprising to me because I do enjoy having some sort of protein with my meals and that obviously creates a footprint for me because I definitely do not have a farm to grow my food since I live in an apartment.

In order to reduce my footprint I'm going to attempt the following changes:

• Walk, bike, or take public transit whenever possible.
• Eat lower on the food chain-going meatless for at least one meal a week.
• Take shorter, less frequent showers
• Buy less! Replace items only when you really need to.

The biggest challenge for me is going to be not using my car. It gives me a sense of independence by being able to easily go for a drive whenever I need to get away. Another reason it will be difficult to give up is for the fact that I have a lot of time constraints. I have class till 11:20 and then work at 11:30 making it nearly impossible to wait for a bus, walk or bike to work. The days that I do not have these time constraints I'm going to attempt to really use other forms of transportation.

I'm going to also try and eat less meat. This may be really difficult because I really enjoy great tasting food that I've grown up on. I need to experiment with flavors in order to change my thoughts that food without meat is less flavorful.

Showers are my favorite thing in the world! It's a place were I put my day in order in my mind, I love the warmth, and its a place to get away from it all. My showers are on average about 15 minutes, so my goal is to keep it to about 10 mins tops with one day where I can enjoy the warmth a little longer.

These goals seem manageable so wish me luck on sticking to them!