imothy D. Sands, at left, director of Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center in Discovery Park, and graduate student Mark Oliver, operate a "reactor" in work aimed at perfecting solid-state lighting, a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted. Purdue researchers have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of the lighting technology, called light-emitting diodes. (Photo by David Umberger, courtesy of Purdue News Service)
Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:
Transcript
Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:
Plain-old incandescent lightbulbs are not efficient. That’s
old news.
And fluorescents? The color is funny and they have toxic
mercury in them.
So, what option is left?
LED lights. They’re as efficient as compact flourescents
minus the mercury.
The problem? They’re one-hundred-dollars-a-bulb
expensive.
But scientists at Purdue have been working on a way to
cut that cost.
Researcher Timothy Sands says in about 5 years, LEDs could
cost the same as the other bulbs.
“So, the nice thing about it is you can save energy, and
actually save money over the long haul – even though the
initial cost is very high right now, without changing what
you’re used to, or without lowering your standards for
lighting.”
And Sands says another big advantage of LEDs is you’d only
have to change the bulbs every 15 years.
For The Environment Report, this is Jessi Ziegler.