Staggering Progress in Technology - LEDs

The progress of LEDs from little blinking power indicator lights on electrical devices to fully-fledged replacements for the power-hungry incandescent light bulb is truly astounding.

In the late 1990s, the brightest LED lights you could buy produced around 10 lumens of light. By 2005, you could get LED packages that produce 100 lumens. Recently progress has accelerated, so that you can now get LED packages that produce 1,000 lumens of light. If current trends continue you'll be able to buy 10,000-lumen LED lights in a few years.

For comparison, a 100-watt incandescent light bulb produces around 1,700 lumens. So LED lights are becoming nearly as bright as conventional lighting sources. This could be a huge deal for energy efficiency, as LEDs have always converted energy into light more efficiently than conventional lighting technologies. This could be a huge boon in the developing world, where people might be able to capture energy with solar panels during the day and then use it to light their homes at night.

There's a formula known as Haitz's law which says that every 10 years, the power of LED lighting packages will increase by a factor of 20, while the cost of these packages, per unit of illumination, will fall by a factor of 10.

The solid dots represent the number of lumens — a unit of illumination — produced by an LED lighting package. And notice that this is a logarithmic scale — each time you go up from one notch to the next, the amount of illumination (or the cost) goes up by a factor of 10.

Source: Vox.com