The Building Technologies Program that’s part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) last month released a report on the life-cycle energy consumption of various types of lighting, a resource the electrical industry’s salespeople could use when presenting the case for LED lighting as an alternative.
To put together the report, titled “Life-Cycle Assessment of Energy and Environmental Impacts of LED Lighting Products,” part one of a multi-part series, its authors drew together at least 10 existing studies on energy use and environmental impact related to the manufacturing, transportation and use of incandescent, halogen, compact fluorescent and light-emitting diode (LED) lamps designed for similar applications.
To level the field for the comparisons and compensate for the shorter average life expectancy of the older technologies, the study looked at a functional unit of 20 million lumen-hours — roughly the lighting service provided by one 60W-equivalent LED — which meant comparing the LED with about three CFLs, 22 incandescent lamps and 27 halogen lamps. The overall conclusions of the report show that the total life-cycle energy consumption of current LED lamps and compact fluorescent lamps are roughly equal at less than a third of the total consumption by halogens and just over a quarter of the energy consumed by incandescent lamps. The report further showed that using the same calculations, if lighting manufacturers hit their projections for improvements in efficiency, LEDs in 2015 will cut the life-cycle energy use by half from 2011 levels.
In all cases, the vast majority (about 90 percent) of the energy was consumed in the use of the lamps. Manufacturing and transportation accounted for a tiny sliver of the products’ total life-cycle energy consumption, transportation smallest of all at less than one percent. The report can be found at the website: www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/.