[tomjen3]

Have you actually used an LED light?

I have - and they are insanely expensive (okay thats to be expected) but what is worse is that they give very, very little light, not enough to light even a dinner table, let alone a small room.

Those compact fluorescent lights? Yeah not only do they flicker (which is bad for your eyes, even though it is not fast enough that you can see them just like the old CRT monitors) and there is some evidence that they may be linked to eye cancer, but even if they aren't they take about 30 seconds to turn on fully, which means I have to walk the corridor in the dark (what then is the purpose of lightning? fuck if I know). We don't need LED lighting, we don't need compact fluorescent lighting, we need actually useful lighting, which means incandescent light bulbs for at least the next 30 years.

Call me back in 2040 and we can try again.

[rdl]

You're right that LEDs aren't there yet in terms of price, but in new installations where you build LED lighting in rather than trying to retrofit existing incandescent fixtures with LED bulbs, you can get some amazing lighting with LED which isn't possible any other way.

On the environment, the low hanging fruit is to make electricity incredibly cheap -- I want PV solar and wind for grid resilience, but huge nuclear fission (U-233/Thorium, or reprocessing of U-235/Pu-239) using standardized designs in large quantities.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This is a problem with LED lights, but it's not a problem with the technology.

LED are expensive now, but the price/performance ratio and efficiency are improving rapidly. And as the other poster said, when designed in properly into new installations they can have excellent performance. But their lighting and heat dissipation characteristics are so different that they really don't do well when retrofitted into fixtures that were designed for incandescents or fluorescents.

The problem is that most of the "LED bulb replacements" and fixtures available to the consumer now are low-efficiency, expensive incandescent replacements that only exist to capture the buyer's money, not to offer better performance.