
Trying to Solve the L.E.D. Quandary - ohjeez
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/trying-to-solve-the-l-e-d-quandary?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
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pipio21
Quandary?

As a market matures, new markets appear. When LEDs become so cheap and you
have all the light you need, you could add more light or find new
applications.

For example, right now using LEDSs for growing food is cost prohibitive, but
if prices go down a significant amount of agriculture could be done with it,
as solar panels are way more efficient converting light to energy and you
could close your plants away from pests without insecticides, or underground,
or transport the energy to places in winter without natural light.

This application alone could mean hundreds of times more LED light than what
is used today in houses.

~~~
incompatible
Wouldn't growing food with solar cells and LEDs be less efficient in land
usage than simply allowing the sun to shine on the plants?

~~~
Teever
You'd think so but not necessarily.

Photovoltaic cells can take in a broader range of energy from the sun than
plants can through photosynthesis. LEDs can then emit that energy at specific
wavelengths such as red or blue that the plants can take in.

The whole system can end up being more efficient.

Furthermore the prospect of growing plants in a completely controlled
environment where you can control all the variables from light intensity,
light cycle, temperature, humidity and remove the pest factor and therefore
the cost of pesticides can result in a much better final product.

~~~
Swizec
Honest question: Would this type of production be considered organic? There's
no pesticides and such, but it's also not quite "natural".

~~~
0xcde4c3db
I think it depends on which definition one subscribes to. Broadly speaking,
there are two major lenses through which "organic" is viewed:

1) Focuses on holistic management, rejects intensive injection of industrial
inputs into the farm/garden, and emphasizes applications of emergent activity
of native species rather than aggressive "pest control".

2) Focuses on keeping "unnatural" chemicals or genes out of / off of the food.

I think this approach would tend to look organic under lens #2 but not lens
#1. Various definitions of "organic" lend different weights to them and
introduce other considerations, though.

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robbrown451
I don't see how this is a "quandary." It's just a product becoming obsolete.
The new product, LED bulbs, doesn't fill the same market niche. There should
be no expectation that the same companies that once produced incandescent
bulbs should transition into making LED bulbs. At least in an economic sense,
they are very different things.

Thinking they are the same thing is like thinking that hard drives and cloud
storage are equivalent to blank videotapes and cassettes, or camera film. They
just aren't.

If LED makers are failing to make money, that is because there is too much
competition. Companies will exit the business until a new equilibrium is
reached. The price of LED bulbs may go up, and that's ok.

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tmm
I don't really see the long term problem. When light bulbs truly stop needing
to be replaced, they will stop being _replaceable_. The market that will
disappear is the light socket market. Consumers will buy a lamp with a
permanently wired in LED and when they get tired of the way the lamp looks,
they'll replace it along with the LED in it. This is already happening in wall
and ceiling fixtures.

~~~
ars
I considered buying a few of those, but I realized that if one lamp in the
room failed, but the others were good, I'd have to replace them all since I'd
be unlikely to be able to find an exact match.

So I decided to buy regular fixtures with replaceable bulbs.

The non replaceable kind only makes sense in places where you need light, but
you don't see the actual fixture (for example edge lighting a room or stairs).

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bbcbasic
I started reading the first paragraph and thought "ha ha I will sarcastically
comment about "Light Bulbs as a Service"", because that would just be plain
ridiculous, and then...

~~~
taneq
And just like almost every other FPAAS (Former Product As A Service) touted in
the past ten years, it's got nothing to do with customer benefits and
everything to do with milking an ongoing revenue stream from the suckers that
use your product.

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bhauer
I had understood color rendering index (CRI) to be independent from color
temperature. This article suggests CRI and temperature are—if not the same
thing—correlated. Perhaps that is true, but I know that I have gone out of my
way in the past to buy high-CRI, high-color temperature bulbs because I prefer
"daylight" (~5100K) illumination. I've got some 5100K bulbs that were rated at
90+ CRI in my kitchen and I love it.

~~~
Declanomous
I suspect a lot of the R&D in LED manufacturing has been focused on bulbs
which functionally replace incandescent. Creating functional replacements of
incandescent bulbs is certainly a noble goal, but incandescent lights aren't
uniquely suited to every situation.

For instance, I live in a row house. The south facing windows have shades over
them, which I can't remove because I'm renting. This means the amount of
natural light is extremely limited inside. I find that if I don't spend some
time in the sun early in the morning, I feel extremely sluggish and lethargic.

Replacing the sun is really hard though. Not only does the sun have a
"perfect" CRI, but it is extremely bright and provides a very diffuse light.
(Not to mention, the sun is really cheap). I've found the easiest way to mimic
the diffuse nature of sunlight is to have a number of light sources.

Right now, the only "sunlight" (7500k+) bulbs that I can find that are
inexpensive enough to cover my living room, render color well, and are
efficient enough to keep on during the day are florescent. Halogen uses too
much power and generates too much head. I can't seem to find reasonably priced
LEDs with a good CRI above 5000k.

I've only been able to find 2 kinds of "sunlight" LEDs. One is 75-watt BR40
(or lower wattage BRxx lights), which, as spotlights, are not very versatile.
The other are "grow-lights", which I am hesitant to buy, since I have little
interest in partaking in a no-knock raid at 2 AM. That might be paranoia, but
I've heard stories at the homebrew/hydroponic store where I buy my homebrew
supplies, and I don't think it's too unlikely.

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daveguy
>Cree is approaching L.E.D. lights as products, like smartphones, that people
will regularly upgrade in order to benefit from new features or improvements.

Isn't that cute.

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Animats
What Cree is actually doing is replacing their claimed 10,000 hour bulb with a
5,000 hour bulb. However, their 10,000 hour bulb doesn't achieve its rated
life; I now have four failed ones. The power supply, not the LEDs, fail.

The coming thing is a power supply that doesn't use electrolytic
capacitors.[1][2] This should increase power supply life beyond LED life, to
about 40,000 hours. But will we see that in consumer products?

[1] [http://www.ledsmagazine.com/ugc/2011/09/dali-power-
unveils-l...](http://www.ledsmagazine.com/ugc/2011/09/dali-power-unveils-led-
lighting-driver-solution-without-electrolytic-capacitor.html) [2]
[http://www.rle.mit.edu/per/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/Chen-E...](http://www.rle.mit.edu/per/wp-
content/uploads/2014/10/Chen-Electrolytic-Free.pdf)

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zipfle
For the reference of people commenting here, the definition of quandary is "a
state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation"

I imagine that if you are Sylvania, or if you are thinking about making large
investments in LED manufacturing capacity, then yes, this is a quandary.

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cowsandmilk
I think LED opens the possibility for more custom lighting. If the lights are
going to last over 20 years (or possibly longer with higher quality), why not
do a custom lighting design for your bathroom or kitchen? You don't need to be
limited to standard shapes of globes, tubes, circles, and A-lines, you want a
wavy design or a varying radius, that's great. It will live until your next
remodel when you can have a new custom lighting design.

~~~
zabuni
I believe the same. Nobody writes an article called the granite counter top
quandary. You won't buy leds, the contractors constructing the house will.

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Zigurd
It isn't a quandary. Innovation does not owe you a future. Electric cars, and
self-driving cars, will reduce annual unit volume for cars, and might simplify
cars, along with carbon reinforced plastics, so that lightweight, inexpensive
cars are possible. Light bulb makers that forestall a cheap, lifetime LED
product will fall to Asian competitors who will take whatever market opening
exists, and worry about saturation later.

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carapace
What quandary? Let global demand fall off to replacement rates.

So what if there's only one light-bulb factory left in the world and they only
produce three bulbs a year?

Heck, in about fifteen minutes or so nanotech will happen and all this is
moot. I've said it before: there's an inflection point after which anyone in
manufacturing that _isn 't_ doing nano is just playing with toys. And we may
be past that point already.

~~~
majewsky
I have the feeling that 99% of IT is "just playing with toys" already.

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Lagged2Death
_UrbanVolt solves the problem by replacing its customers’ lights at no initial
cost; each client then pays UrbanVolt a monthly share of the savings on its
electrical bill._

This is exactly how the makers of advanced stationary steam engines operated
after the start of the industrial revolution. The engine is "free," the
customer pays a fraction of the fuel savings.

What I don't understand is: how come it's not the established players like GE
or ConEd who are pursuing these strategies? If someone's going to eat your
lunch, why not make sure it's you?

~~~
buzzybee
It's really, really hard to change an old organization to follow a different
business model without effectively firing everyone, selling everything off,
and starting over. There's inertia in the various forms of personnel
specialties, management style, capital expenditures, and financing. A tiny
company can change that stuff in the span of a single email because there
isn't anything to unwind, but a big company that has gone to great effort to
optimize its existing position and has a lot of stakeholders to appease will
run into trouble even if it has visionary leadership that can see the problem.

For that reason, startups can persistently find opportunities: e.g. IBM had a
rental-computing business model, so it gave up a big early advantage in the PC
market while scarcely realizing it; Microsoft swooped in to occupy the new
monopoly on software.

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wgj
Here is the real problem. Incandescent bulb tech has been capable of being far
more long-lasting, and therefore cheaper, since nearly the beginning. [1] The
entire industry has been based on a kind of lie.

We are very fortunate that the LED industry has not been tainted by this
mindset, and really most modern tech hasn't.

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-
lightbu...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbulb-
conspiracy)

~~~
ars
> has been capable of being far more long-lasting

Sorry, but that's not true. In order to make longer lasting bulbs you have to
reduce the energy efficiency (i.e. don't run as hot).

> and therefore cheaper

You'll pay more in electricity than in bulbs with longer lasting type. It's
not actually worth it.

That cartel had bad intentions but good results - if you run the number you'll
see that they actually saved people money.

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mmagin
There's a reason why I've put in commercial-grade LED fixtures in my kitchen
and garage. I'm willing to pay a premium for something that'll possibly last
the next 20+ years with how few hours a day I use it.

Unfortunately most of those products don't really fit the decor of the rest of
the house.

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kefka_p
If you consider the matter in the long-term, the sustainable model is the only
approach that actually provides returns over time. At the end of the day the
argument is everything now or a little now and a little later.

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M_Grey
"Yeah, and when are we going to see subsidies for buggy whips?!" -Confused
Author

I'm not sure how else to interpret this article; are we supposed to buy shit
for the sake of buying shit?

~~~
majewsky
Isn't that what capitalism is all about? /s

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blazespin
"can’t make money in the long run from products that rarely need replacing. "

What a ludicrous statement. Price = f(supply,demand). Just decrease supply,
voila, profit.

~~~
wlesieutre
That's like saying "I wish we could charge more for cell phones. I know! We'll
decrease the supply and make a ton of money!"

It's a cutthroat market and someone will replace you.

~~~
pc2g4d
It's not an individual firm that will decrease the supply, but the market as a
whole. Largely this will occur as companies go out of business or shut down
their LED operations because they're not profitable. Eventually when few
enough firms are competing, the remaining firms involved in the market will be
able to turn a profit and the market will stabilize. At least that's what I
would expect.

Other sectors have experienced dramatic drops in demand, and the world doesn't
end, even though some companies might. I expect the few companies that keep
selling long-lived LEDs will outlast their more gimmicky counterparts.

~~~
wlesieutre
I don't expect people to find much money in LED lightbulbs. You buy the LEDs
from one of the big LED producers, and then the rest is commodity electronics.
If there starts being money in it, new companies will jump in.

Which I suppose can get prices down to the point where someone can make a
company that stays in business, but it won't get them to a point where there
are significant profits to be found.

EDIT: The area where this is likely wrong is the locked-in home automation
silos where you can get people into an ecosystem and then screw them as much
as you like. I'm hoping we can avoid that being the dominant strategy.

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rdiddly
Sounds like I need to stock up now on LED bulbs for life, before the whole
market is flooded with planned-obsolescent pieces-o-shit (if it isn't
already).

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jhallenworld
They should form a cartel:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel)

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1_2__3
> The question remains whether any company has an incentive to make a product
> that is not designed to fall apart or become obsolete.

What a patently ridiculous question to ask. I can't even fathom how the writer
thought it up, but I can only imagine they must have gone into a coma
immediately afterwards. It's a question in the way "I wonder if elephants can
fly?" is a question.

