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PV: Plenarvorträge

PV III

PV III: Plenarvortrag

Dienstag, 25. März 2003, 08:30–09:15, HSZ/01

Another Semiconductor Revolution: This Time It’s Lighting! — •Roland Haitz — Agilent Technologies

Semiconductor based light sources such as Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) or their laser variant are emerging as an attractive new lighting technology with many unique advantages: (1) Precise wavelength control avoids energy waste caused by infrared or ultra-violet emission. (2) Long operating life (10–100khrs), even in rugged environments, reduces maintenance cost. (3) The LED structure as a cold point source allows for compact optical elements and efficient light distribution. These and other advantages will translate into an important economic and environmental opportunity with significant impact on electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emission.

The presentation will briefly touch on the physics of the light generation process and on the historical development of LEDs over the last three decades. The bulk of the presentation will review the current capability of the LED technology, the most demanding near term challenges, the improvement projections for the next 10–20 years and the subsequent economic and environmental benefits.

The confidence in our projections has forced us to ask the compelling question: What does it take in additional up-front investments to achieve these projected benefits faster? In the USA, the result is a major government supported research investment, the Next Generation Lighting Initiative, with a $500million budget over the 2003–2012 period. What does it take to initiate a similar program in the environmentally conscious European Union? The challenges in technology and in market conversion are formidable – not to say mind-boggling! A close cooperation between industry, government funding and regulatory agencies is absolutely mandatory to achieve the projected energy savings, and to achieve them sooner.