$20 LED lightbulb at Home Depot a welcome start, but call me when it hits $10 — even better, $5
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
My Clean Break column for this Monday acknowledges Home Depot for selling the first sub-$20 LED lightbulb for a standard household light socket. It was only months ago — weeks, even — that the $40 pricepoint was being tossed around. These lower prices can’t come any faster. I respect the compact fluorescent bulb, I really do, but it just doesn’t cut it for me. Mercury. Premature blowouts. The light quality has gotten much better, and the price has come a long, long way — $1.50 a bulb in most places compared to $11 or $12 a decade ago. But LEDs are just so much more superior.
As we wait for the perfect and affordable household light bulb, it’s nice to see niche LED markets thriving, such as that for municipal streetlights. Companies such as Halifax-based LED Roadway Lighting are making great headway with products that can lower energy consumption by at least 50 per cent and up to 80 per cent and offer better quality and reduced maintenance.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
