How big are the energy savings worldwide if everyone uses LED instead of regular lamps?
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There’s about 8 billion lightbulbs according to Google. If we assume each uses 40wh, that’s ~50 mil megawatt hours per day. Assuming LEDs are using only a fifth of that energy, that’s a 40mil megawatt hours / day reduction.
That number doesn’t mean much I suppose, but if you think that the whole world spends 100 bucks per day on powering regular bulbs, switching would change that to 20 bucks per day.
I wonder how much (if any) “net energy” would be required to produce only LED. Everything from mining to petroleum to plastics to final disposal…
There’s more to consider in the discussion of energy “savings” when switching to LED bulbs from incandescent. If energy is neither lost nor destroyed the extra energy used to operate an incandescent bulb for light is largely taken up by producing heat.
In a building, that extra energy given off as heat isn’t necessarily “wasted”. If you’re living somewhere that requires the home to be heated an argument could be made that the “wasted” energy would be the difference in cost or efficiency between the buildings normal heating source and the energy used by the incandescent bulb. There’s likely efficiency gains from the incandescent bulb in this scenario as you’re heating only the space that you’re currently occupying.
My point in large is that the energy savings by switching to LED lighting is exaggerated or at the least doesn’t take into consideration all determining factors. Then there’s the side discussion on cost and energy required to produce the LED lamp and the cost paid by the consumer. Also, IMO incandescent lamps generally produce a much more pleasant light as the CRI of mass produced consumer LEDs is garbage.
A lot
Start with just the US. A 100W equivalent LED bulb uses 10W so that’s a 90% savings
Say there are 100 million homes, each with 10 60W bulbs that are on 6 hours per day. The incandescent bulbs would consume 131,400 GWh per year. LED bulbs would only consume 13,140 GWh per year
Now for scale, the biggest nuclear power plant in the US makes 31,000 GWh/year, the biggest Dam is at 21,000 GWh/year, and the biggest coal plant makes 18,000 GWh/year
Saving 118,000 GWh/year allows for the shutdown of *at least* 6 coal plants but likely closer to 20 older smaller lower efficiency ones since the really big ones are actually a lot cleaner and cost effective than the older smaller ones
Even if ‘they’ figured out energy efficiency, ‘they’ will never allow our power bills to be lowered.
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