Low Energy Lighting Delivers Cheap Electricity

Here's a subject everyone and their cat seems to drone on about of late. The price of energy. We all know that there's only so much oil left in the ground (less than half of what we started with to be precise - Peak Oil anyone?). So energy from fossil fuels seems unlike to get any cheaper any time soon or indeed any time ever, barring periodic bouts of recession of course.

Anyway, cost aside, fossil fuels are in the dog house over Climate Change and whether you or any one else believes a word of it matters not one rat's ass. Carbon taxes and a miasma of other Green Initiatives are here to stay - when was the last time you heard of a tax being repealed? Quite.

So if Big Oil and the existing energy utility companies aren't about to offer discount electricity, how about alternative energy sources like solar, thermal and wind power? Yeah, like we really need more hot air and wind? The fact is that promising as many of these alternative energy technologies may be, none can yet cut it on anything close to the scale we need. Next time you suffer a power cut, reach for your wind-up torch and solar powered calculator and see if you can work out what the problem might be.

So cheap electricity, let alone cheap sustainable, renewable, dazzling emerald green electricity seems to be off the menu for the near future. But there is an interesting inversion of this problem that restates what it means to get cheap electricity. The basic premise is that you drop the obsession with the Holy Grail of cheap energy and focus instead on technologies that use considerably less energy. The specific example deals with low energy lighting.

Let's put some flesh on the bones of this idea.

Take a common or garden 100w incandescent light bulb (if you can still find one since they're in the process of being banned - by the way, if that was news to you then you really ought to get up to speed on the subject of energy saving light bulbs).

And now let's do some math. A commonly adopted average unit price for electricity is 10 cents per kilowatt hour. The lifespan of a regular 100w bulb is 2,000 hours (about 18 months typically). So over that period it will cost $20 to get light from that one bulb. You can see immediately where the cost of lighting is, can't you?

Now obviously we don't want to compromise by switching lights on for only half as long or by using a measly 50w bulb instead. And we don't have to. Enter stage left the latest generation of easily available domestic LED light bulbs.

Take for example, the Cree Evolux series and similar LED spotlights that are now capable of producing over 100 lumens per watt. To understand what that means, the Cree Evolux uses a 13w LED to produce brightness of over 1,000 lumens - about the same as our traditional 100w bulb. It also lasts for 50,000 hours but in the interests of a straight comparison we'll measure what it costs to run the LED light bulb over the somewhat feeble 2,000 hour lifetime of the 100w bulb.

So let's see... that's 13w over 2000 hours at 10 cents per kWh, tappety tap and the answer is $2.60 - compared to $20!

I don't know about you, but at this point I've lost interest in finding the best deal on cheap electricity. What am I going to find anyway - 2% savings, 5% cheaper? It's not even close to the 90% saving on electricity I can get by switching to low energy lighting and wherever possible to LED lighting. Cheaper than cheap electricity? You bet. In fact there's probably only one way to improve on it and that's to make your own electricity.

So then, switching to low energy lighting could slash anything up to 1/4 out your total household energy bill, but there's obviously still heating and cooking to consider. For that you might want to find out why installing wood burning stoves is now uber-popular in these new and uncertain times.