Unintended consequences of LEDs
Posted: December 19th, 2009 | 3 Comments »Progress is always a double edged sword, here comes another example:
Traffic lights using state-of-the-art LED illumination use 90 percent less electricity, offer a much longer service life and are more durable than their incandescent counterparts [...] Unfortunately, the low-watt LED units burn much cooler than its white-hot counterpart making it unable to melt snow off weather exposed traffic fixtures.
With the work needed to clear the lights (“compressed air”, “city workers to brush the snow off by hand”) what is the true benefit of these in terms of carbon emission?
Depends on how often it snows I guess…. If global warming is really going to happen, it’s not an issue, if it is not going to happen, it’s not a problem.
But seriously, this kind of thing is true for most ‘green solutions’ we are confronted with these days. Just compare it to the discussion on which car is cleaner in the end: the Toyota Prius or the Hummer, if you include research and production polution, or the fact that the CO2 exhaust for the conference in Kopenhagen was the largest for this type of conference ever.
Nobody seems to be looking at the big picture, and your post summarizes it perfectly.
[...] voici une illustration, trouvée sur le blog de Laurent Haug, démontrant au passage qu’il ne suffit pas toujours d’adapter les modèles anciens [...]
The traffic lights depicted above are an interesting example of how evolutionary design fails in the short term. The cowls that have shaded the weaker traditional lighting from direct sunlight allow the snow to buildup on the glass surface. A core design benefit of LED lighting has not been realized here. Lose the shades and mitigate the possibility of snow buildup.
Kodos on the site by the way!