Edison quote: "There’s a better way to do it. Find it. ” Swoboda believes his company has done just that. More than 130 years after Thomas Edison created the first salable lightbulb, his design remains little changed. Electricity flows across a resistant wire in an oxygen-free environment and glows. Cree’s lightbulb, on the other hand, uses an array of light-emitting diodes to create a similar kind of rich, warm light without the headache-inducing flicker of compact fluorescent bulbs. It does so with unassailable economy. A regular incandescent bulb costs $1 and uses $7 of electricity a year if used three hours a day. A Cree bulb may cost $10, but it uses 10% of the electricity, costing $1 a year. And while an old-school bulb will burn out in less than two years at that rate, LED bulbs will keep working for more than 20 years. At a cost of $9.97 for the equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent, or $12.97 for a 60-watt replacement, the Cree bulbs are cheaper than comparable LED offerings from rivals. That performance is a big reason Cree now boasts $1.3 billion in sales and $70 million in earnings. Its market cap of $7 billion has doubled in less than a year; investors foresee broad adoption of LEDs once federal lighting standards force the phaseout of 40- and 60-watt incandescents in 2014. Nationwide, of roughly 6 billion lightbulbs in American homes, 3.6 billion are incandescents. Lighting sucks up roughly 14% of America’s electricity; replacing all those Edison bulbs with LEDs could cut that demand in half. earthspheredevelopment/1/post/2013/06/the-20-year-lightbulb.html
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 01:41:25 +0000
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