As a market matures, new markets appear. When LEDs become so cheap and you have all the light you need, you could add more light or find new applications.

For example, right now using LEDSs for growing food is cost prohibitive, but if prices go down a significant amount of agriculture could be done with it, as solar panels are way more efficient converting light to energy and you could close your plants away from pests without insecticides, or underground, or transport the energy to places in winter without natural light.

This application alone could mean hundreds of times more LED light than what is used today in houses.

Photovoltaic cells can take in a broader range of energy from the sun than plants can through photosynthesis. LEDs can then emit that energy at specific wavelengths such as red or blue that the plants can take in.

The whole system can end up being more efficient.

Furthermore the prospect of growing plants in a completely controlled environment where you can control all the variables from light intensity, light cycle, temperature, humidity and remove the pest factor and therefore the cost of pesticides can result in a much better final product.

1) Focuses on holistic management, rejects intensive injection of industrial inputs into the farm/garden, and emphasizes applications of emergent activity of native species rather than aggressive "pest control".

2) Focuses on keeping "unnatural" chemicals or genes out of / off of the food.

I think this approach would tend to look organic under lens #2 but not lens #1. Various definitions of "organic" lend different weights to them and introduce other considerations, though.

A really good diode light source might have a wall plug electricity-to-photons efficiency of ~50%, and the best rooftop solar modules achieve a bit over 20% light-to-electricity conversion efficiency. I would really be curious if anyone can provide citations to the effect that sunlight -> PV -> LED light -> plants is more efficient than sunlight -> plants. You'd have to get an enormous benefit from wavelength shifting, enough to offset the ~90% energy losses from sunlight -> PV -> LED light.

So, ignoring costs you can come surprisingly close to break even in terms of energy budget. Though we are likely better off going with GMO plants to capture more light than build millions of acres of solar farms just to break even.

Thinking they are the same thing is like thinking that hard drives and cloud storage are equivalent to blank videotapes and cassettes, or camera film. They just aren't.

If LED makers are failing to make money, that is because there is too much competition. Companies will exit the business until a new equilibrium is reached. The price of LED bulbs may go up, and that's ok.

So I decided to buy regular fixtures with replaceable bulbs.

The non replaceable kind only makes sense in places where you need light, but you don't see the actual fixture (for example edge lighting a room or stairs).

For instance, I live in a row house. The south facing windows have shades over them, which I can't remove because I'm renting. This means the amount of natural light is extremely limited inside. I find that if I don't spend some time in the sun early in the morning, I feel extremely sluggish and lethargic.

Replacing the sun is really hard though. Not only does the sun have a "perfect" CRI, but it is extremely bright and provides a very diffuse light. (Not to mention, the sun is really cheap). I've found the easiest way to mimic the diffuse nature of sunlight is to have a number of light sources.

Right now, the only "sunlight" (7500k+) bulbs that I can find that are inexpensive enough to cover my living room, render color well, and are efficient enough to keep on during the day are florescent. Halogen uses too much power and generates too much head. I can't seem to find reasonably priced LEDs with a good CRI above 5000k.

I've only been able to find 2 kinds of "sunlight" LEDs. One is 75-watt BR40 (or lower wattage BRxx lights), which, as spotlights, are not very versatile. The other are "grow-lights", which I am hesitant to buy, since I have little interest in partaking in a no-knock raid at 2 AM. That might be paranoia, but I've heard stories at the homebrew/hydroponic store where I buy my homebrew supplies, and I don't think it's too unlikely.

http://www.topbulb.com/color-rendering-index

that graphically shows the color distribution. Temp is where on the visible color spectrum its focus is.

For example, if you're looking to replace your household tungsten lightbulbs then it's really important to pay attention to the R9 value that your LED ilght has (1), as it refers to the red value being emitted by the bulb and is what affects skin-tones.

And, yes, CRI is completely independent of temperature. You can have a daylight or tungsten LED bulb with completely varying CRI values.

(1)http://www.eyelighting.com/resources/lighting-technology-edu...

These 5100K, 90+ CRI bulbs in your kitchen -- are they fluorescents or LEDs?

Isn't that cute.

The coming thing is a power supply that doesn't use electrolytic capacitors.[1][2] This should increase power supply life beyond LED life, to about 40,000 hours. But will we see that in consumer products?

[1] http://www.ledsmagazine.com/ugc/2011/09/dali-power-unveils-l... [2] http://www.rle.mit.edu/per/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Chen-E...

I imagine that if you are Sylvania, or if you are thinking about making large investments in LED manufacturing capacity, then yes, this is a quandary.

So what if there's only one light-bulb factory left in the world and they only produce three bulbs a year?

Heck, in about fifteen minutes or so nanotech will happen and all this is moot. I've said it before: there's an inflection point after which anyone in manufacturing that isn't doing nano is just playing with toys. And we may be past that point already.

This is exactly how the makers of advanced stationary steam engines operated after the start of the industrial revolution. The engine is "free," the customer pays a fraction of the fuel savings.

What I don't understand is: how come it's not the established players like GE or ConEd who are pursuing these strategies? If someone's going to eat your lunch, why not make sure it's you?

For that reason, startups can persistently find opportunities: e.g. IBM had a rental-computing business model, so it gave up a big early advantage in the PC market while scarcely realizing it; Microsoft swooped in to occupy the new monopoly on software.

We are very fortunate that the LED industry has not been tainted by this mindset, and really most modern tech hasn't.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbu...

Sorry, but that's not true. In order to make longer lasting bulbs you have to reduce the energy efficiency (i.e. don't run as hot).

> and therefore cheaper

You'll pay more in electricity than in bulbs with longer lasting type. It's not actually worth it.

That cartel had bad intentions but good results - if you run the number you'll see that they actually saved people money.

Unfortunately most of those products don't really fit the decor of the rest of the house.

I'm not sure how else to interpret this article; are we supposed to buy shit for the sake of buying shit?

What a ludicrous statement. Price = f(supply,demand). Just decrease supply, voila, profit.

It's a cutthroat market and someone will replace you.

Other sectors have experienced dramatic drops in demand, and the world doesn't end, even though some companies might. I expect the few companies that keep selling long-lived LEDs will outlast their more gimmicky counterparts.

Which I suppose can get prices down to the point where someone can make a company that stays in business, but it won't get them to a point where there are significant profits to be found.

EDIT: The area where this is likely wrong is the locked-in home automation silos where you can get people into an ecosystem and then screw them as much as you like. I'm hoping we can avoid that being the dominant strategy.

What a patently ridiculous question to ask. I can't even fathom how the writer thought it up, but I can only imagine they must have gone into a coma immediately afterwards. It's a question in the way "I wonder if elephants can fly?" is a question.