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The Indian Angle
The energy imperative
Both globally and in India, real issues of energy gaps, economic needs and the worsening environment crisis really makes a powerful case for switch to LED lighting.
Lighting makes up about 20% of the global electricity consumption. That is a whopping 3.2 trillion watts of the total energy consumption rate of 16 trillion watts. An even more whopping 29.0 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions result as a consequence of this electricity consumption (going to 33.1 billion metric tons in 2015 and 40.4 billion metric tons
in 2030)*
*International Energy Outlook 2009
Obviously, need for efficient energy and efficient consumption is growing driven by:
- Energy prices
- Economic growth especially in developing countries like BRIC driven by unclean energy ( i.e. fossil fuel)
- Major energy shortages in India - in fact, India's energy gap peaked in June 2009 (a staggering 14%!)
- Lack of stability (and supply security issues) from oil producing nations
- Environmental and climate change mandates (Kyoto, Copenhagen) of reducing carbon emissions and footprint
Given these issues, improving energy end-use and supply efficiencies is far preferable than producing more energy especially in a developing country like India and in an era of drastic climate change:
- Conventional energy (coal / thermal) has enormous inneffiencies across the cycle from inneffient production (only 33% of energy converted to electricity) to transmission losses (20% of produced electricity)
- One unit of energy saved at the consumer end avoids nearly 2.5 to 3 times of capacity augmentation due to various production, transmission and distribution losses
- Energy efficiency can generate immediate results
- Generate strong financial returns
- LED Technology is now efficient enough (~130 lumens / watt and growing) to drive real benefits in lighting energy savings
- LED technology is already proven for mainstream and large scale use