Did you know that the average residential light socket is used about 700 hours per year? [if you do the math, that is about 1.9 hours per day, which passes the sanity/gut check]The Department of Energy (DOE) has instituted the "L Prize", a competition that challenges lighting designers to replace the commonly used 60W light bulb with the PAR 38 halogen lamp with ultra-efficient solid-state lighting products. A future L Prize program will call for development of a new 21st-century lamp that delivers more than 150 lumen's per watt.
So what does it all mean? The L Prize competition focuses on development and market adoption of a solid-state lighting replacement for the 60W lamp that uses only 10W - a savings of 83%. If every socket in the United States converted from 60W incandescent lamps to the 10W L Prize winner, the country would save 34 terawatt-hours of electricity per year; enough to power the lights of 17.4 million households (twice the consumption of Las Vegas). That also equates to 5.6 million tons of carbon emissions).
Do you use energy efficient lighting? If not, why not?
For a listing of current light bulb options and information, click here.
