This year's Nobel for a physics discovery went to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for their research which made the creation of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) possible.
Why was the color blue so important? Well, if you want to make white light for general purpose lighting, you can't do it with just red and green LEDs, which were in existence for at least 30 years before the blue one was invented. Remember, white is what you get when you combine all three primary colors, so blue was the remaining puzzle piece for any practical application of LEDs in homes and businesses.
Since an LED bulb can produce anywhere from 50-300 lumens per watt, even at the low end, it uses less than a third of the energy required to light an incandescent bulb.
"Something like a fourth of our electricity consumption goes to illumination," Nobel Prize committee member Olle Inganäs of Linköping University in Sweden said during a press conference October 7 announcing the award. "Having much more light for much less electricity is really going to have a big impact."
Let's crunch some numbers real quick...
Globally, electricity generation accounts for about 10 billion metric tons of CO2 each year. One quarter of that, or the CO2 output for lighting based on Inganäs' number, equals 2.5 billion metric tons. Assuming all incandescent light sources, we could reduce global CO2 emissions by about 1.7 metric tons if we switched everything over to LEDs. That won't exactly keep the Arctic from becoming ice-free in summer, so "big impact" may be overstating things, but it's a start. Go show some appreciation for the blue LED and swap whatever bulbs you can, people. :)
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