Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [108]
It's one thing to recognize that the grid is no longer adequate, another to build a viable alternative. The development of nanotube technology, energy storage, and smart grid technology will require large-scale research-and-development projects and investment in science education, both of which will take considerable private and public funding. Smalley, before his death from leukemia in 2005, commented:
Energy is at the core of virtually every problem facing humanity. We cannot afford to get this wrong. We should be skeptical of optimism that the existing energy industry will be able to work this out on its own.... America, the land of technological optimists, the land of Thomas Edison, should take the lead. We should launch a bold New Energy Research Program. Just a nickel from every gallon of gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, and jet fuel would generate $10 billion a year.... Sustained year after year, this New Energy Research Program will inspire a new Sputnik Generation of American scientists and engineers.... At best we will solve the energy problem within this next generation; solve it for ourselves and, by example, solve it for the rest of humanity on this planet.
It's not only the grid that needs reimagining. Homes and businesses need to become more energy efficient, too, as does lighting itself, especially now that many of us use more—and brighter—lights than ever before. Illumination still accounts for 6 to 7 percent of the energy consumed in the United States. We can create almost any effect we want: Ambient light can be diffused throughout the room. Bulbs can be recessed, shielded, layered, activated by sensors, or gradually dimmed. Lighting within a room can change hour by hour, with mood, with purpose. But in American homes, all these many effects are still largely achieved with incandescent light.
The most efficient practical cold light remains fluorescent, and in some respects fluorescent's quality has vastly improved since being showcased at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The delay time is shorter, the buzzes and flickers have diminished, and compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) can fit into traditional incandescent sockets. But it's also true that the general quality of CFLs has been erratic, especially in recent years, as companies have attempted to lower the purchase price of them. And they still aren't as versatile as filament bulbs. Some CFLs can't be used with dimmer switches, and the life of others is diminished when they are used in confined places such as recessed ceiling fixtures, which tend to get quite warm.
But fluorescent light remains coolly efficient. A new 13-watt compact fluorescent produces as many lumens as a 60-watt incandescent bulb while using one-quarter of the electricity. Its use eliminates more than a thousand pounds of global warming pollution. Because of such efficiency, CFLs have gained favor in many countries over the past few decades. British lighting historian Brian Bowers notes, "From about 1990 [compact fluorescents] were readily available in high street shops, and by 1995 half the households in Britain were using at least one." By the mid-1990s, half of the households in Germany used CFLs, as did more than 80 percent of households in Japan. In Asian countries in general, compact fluorescents are often more common than incandescent bulbs. One recent traveler to Korea noted, "It took me almost two months of living in Korea before I saw my first incandescent ('old-fashioned') light bulb. All of the others were energy efficient CFLs...[which] are so common here, in fact, that only in one store have I ever actually seen old-fashioned bulbs for sale, and that was in a dollar-store of sorts."
Yet CFLs are still not an easy sell in the United States: "You wake up and