I think that, with the price of LED light bulbs coming down to commodity levels and their long life, the CFL bulbs will become more difficult to obtain. The LED lights are more efficient than CFLs or incandescent bulbs, and there has been a steady increase in Efficiency over time, which will probably continue. Someday the volume of production will go up and prices will contnue to go down, and incandescent and CFLs will no longer be made. It’s just a matter of time before the LED production increase will bring the price down to the point where there will be no difference.
Another contributing factor is that in my area the electric company gives a rebate to the seller to make the price lower for the consumer. They did this back when the CFLs were still high priced and it brought the price down and consumers started to buy them. Now most homes have CFLs and few have incandescents. I think the same thing will happen to the CFLs and LEDs will eventually replace them. People I talk to say CFLs don’t last any longer than incandescent bulbs (they buy cheap CFLs?), and when they find that the LED bulbs last longer and save money, they will probably stop buying CFLs
One other issue that people bring up is that CFLs have a very small amount of mercury in them. This may be used as another reason for discontinuing their sales. However most people don’t realize that the amount of mercury in the coal that is burnt to generate the electricity is much greater then the amount in the CFLs.
I would like to go back to the L Prize winner, the Philips ten watt LED lights that put out 920 lumens. I boughboughtt more than a dozen of these excellent prize-winning lights. They are uniquely designed in that they don’t have the phosphor in the LED. Instead the phosphor is in the plastic cover. If the cover is removed you see the bare blue LEDs. These lights received the prize because they received high ratings in the categories considered important.
Philips has come out with a new line of similar looking LED lights. They’re less expensive and have very good ratings. It’s unfortunate that the consumer doesn’t realize that the price of the light bulb is minor compared to the price of electricity that it uses. They could have purchased the more expensive LED lights a few years ago and the savings in electricity would have more than paid for their more expensive price. The LED light package says it will save over $130 a over its lifetime if used 3 hours per day. That’s 6 or 7 dollars a year, so in 2 or 3 years it has paid for itself.
I can’t predict the future but it’s possible the led lights will be replaced by newer technology in the near Future. One possibility is luminous panels. The thought occurred to me that when a phosphorescent toy is exposed to light it will glow in the dark for some time afterwards. When fiber optics first were developed they had a short distance of light a transmission. As time went on, purer, clearer glass was developed and the transmission distance increased until now it’s possible to transmit light over 90 kilometers or 50 miles of fiber optic cable. If the same development was applied to phosphors, it might be possible to store daylight at high levels and then the glow could light a dwelling for many hours.
Another possibility is that battery technology could be improved so that batteries last longer and don’t need replacing as often. Every home might have a solar panel array that charges the batteries during daylight and powers the lights during darkness. Much of the equipment would be modularized so that it could be easily, quickly and cheaply exchanged or replaced.
No one really knows what will happen in the future, but here’s another idea. Some scientists could take the glow inside of a firefly and transplant the genes into plants that glow in the dark so all you would need is to have some plants growing in your home. They could gather sunlight in the daytime and then glow brightly during darkness. A little water and fertilizer once in awhile, and you won’t need any LED lights anymore. And you could grow your own light bulbs!
