The Lighting Revolution: If We Were Experts Before, We're Novices Now

Electrical lighting has seen many advancements since Edison first patented his version of the incandescent lamp. From those early days, lighting technology eventually changed with the introduction of mercury vapor, fluorescent, metal halide, and high-pressure sodium lamps. While each of these new light sources offered tremendous benefits over the incandescent lamp, their acceptance and any further advancement happened over a number of decades. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a method of general lighting entered the market in the early 2000s. They were expensive and not very energy efficient. Within a few years, these lighting LEDs had dramatically improved. By 2006, they became trendy for residential and commercial applications, crossing over into the roadway lighting market a couple of years later. By 2010, they had become very “popular” as an industrial light source. In 2011, LEDs became mainstream and more affordable. Moving forward, LEDs are poised to dominate. Over the next decade, it is expected that LEDs will render most other light sources obsolete. The dilemma is that just about every evaluation method used for the past 140 years for every other light source cannot be applied directly to LED light sources. This paper will examine the LED revolution and what you need to know to survive.