Most commercial buildings in Australia have moved away from incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescents, which are much more energy efficient and last longer. The limitations of CFLs are slow warm up time, early failure if frequently switched, and high cost for dimmable CFLs. Additionally some speciality bulbs, such as chandelier bulbs, don’t have readily available CFL equivalents. But as CFLs are four or five times more efficient than incandescent in our energy audits we always try to build a strong case for switching to CFLs.

But incandescent may be getting a second life. Australia enacted the first legislation banning  sales of low efficiency lamps (incandescent) and the US followed. With a much larger market than ours this has sparked some innovation in the design of incandescent lamps.

Philips now has a incandescent that is 30% more efficient than a standard incandescent. Osram is shortly coming out with one 25% more efficient.

These sort of efficiency gains still leave CFLs as clearly the superior option, but as there is more research undertaken the incandescent could get even better yet.

If incandescent efficiency can be improved by 20% a year, it will take six or seven years to catch up with where CFLs are now. Which is a long time, unless there is an innovation that provides a quantum improvement in efficiency.

LED lights on the other hand are now getting close to CFL efficiency.

Its great to see all this lighting innovation happening, and hopefully we will soon see screw in and plug in bulbs that are more efficient than CFLs

Research recently undertaken by Siemens says that the lifecycle efficiency of LED lights is equal to that of compact fluorescents.

Measuring the lifecycle efficiency involves looking at the energy to manufacture and dispose of the product, in addition to the energy it uses whilst in operation.

The report was released by Osram, which is owned by Siemans, with the testing taking place by the Siemens Corporate Technology Centre for Eco Innovation, and reported on in the New York Times.

There aren’t many details yet though as to how the research was undertaken or the numbers behind the claims. For example, was the LED light used in the comparison of equivalent brightness to the CFL. 

But it does show that LEDs are getting closer to being the light of the future.