L.E.D. Read online

  It had been expected that the L Prize would be decided following a contest between multiple entrants. Though there was a cash prize only for first place, the rules explicitly allowed for three products to be recognized as winners. It was clear that all existing light bulb manufacturers as well as a slew of new, venture-capital-backed solid-state lighting startups were actively developing LED retrofits. Several of these had already been marketed, but most were low-power, and many poor quality. Some simply burned out after a just few hours. It was precisely such bulbs that the DoE was determined to eliminate. Five other firms expressed an interest in entering the race. In the event, however, it was not until mid 2011 that two other companies - GE and a Melbourne, Florida, based startup called Lighting Science - threw their hats into the ring. They were too late. On August 3 2011, the DoE announced that Philips had won the L Prize and, in consequence, the contest was closed. The Philips entry had passed with flying colors, exceeding the requirements on all fronts. A photograph released to mark the occasion shows a perspex box in which the winning bulb is blazing away proudly. Clustered around the light applauding are various dignitaries, including a delighted-looking Jeff Bingaman. The aim of the L Prize competition had been to drive innovation. It had worked.

  The prize-winning bulb was designed with commercial and institutional building customers in mind. These were sophisticated buyers who could appreciate that, while the initial purchase price might be high, the overall lifetime cost would be much lower than that of conventional alternatives. Priced at $50 a pop, however, it was a Rolls Royce product. The question was now whether Philips could also make a bulb that was affordable. The answer was yes. Even before the announcement of its victory, the company had already brought out a commercial product that was based on the L Prize technology and design. Dubbed the Ambient LED, it drew slightly more power - 12.5 watts - incorporated six fewer LEDs and, at 800 lumens, was somewhat less bright. But though the Ambient LED bulb was selling in big box stores like Home Depot for Ambient LED bulb was selling in big box stores like Home Depot for hour lifetime (or 15 years of normal usage). The lemon-colored remote phosphor outer shell had been replaced with a new, golden-yellow one. To allay consumer concerns about its output hue, the packaging declared “White Light When Lit.” (The remote phosphor approach would subsequently be dropped in favor of designs that closely resembled that of traditional light bulbs.) As for the price, it was clear that the industry expected it would decline dramatically over time. Philips was concentrating its investment on cutting manufacturing costs. For its part, the DoE expected that by 2015 a 60-watt equivalent bulb would sell for $10, putting LEDs within striking range of compact fluorescents.18

  18 A remarkably accurate prediction, as it turned out. In July 2015, Home Depot was selling 60-watt equivalent warm white A19 dimmable LED light bulbs for $9.97 each. And it was possible to buy non-dimming bulbs for much less.

  The L Prize race had undoubtedly shaken things up. Before the prize was announced, bulb makers had lacked ambition. Philips demonstrating that it was indeed possible to produce a 60-watt equivalent using LEDs jolted the company’s rivals out of their complacency. Though it was hard to measure directly, industry observers detected a tremendous uptick in activity. DoE officials reckoned that the prize had speeded the market up by as much as two years. By December 2011, of 135 bulbs the department received for testing as part of its LED Lighting Facts program, 26 produced more than 800 lumens, equivalent to a 60-watt incandescent (though these bulbs could not match the L Prize winner in all aspects). A couple produced more than 1,100 lumens, equivalent to a 75-watt incandescent, and 100-watt replacements were reportedly also under development. In the opinion of LED industry veteran Mark Swoboda, the L Prize was “an early home run, one that we would not have had had [the DoE] not set that in motion.”

  Nonetheless, the government’s role in promoting energy-ef ficient lighting continued controversial. Especially after a front-page article that ran in the Washington Post on March 9, 2012. Headlined “Governmentsubsidized green light carries costly price tag,” it pointed out that the price-tag on the prize-winning entry was $50. “How the expensive bulb won the $10 million government prize meant to foster energy-efficient affordability,” the article asked sarcastically, “is one of the curiosities that arise as the country undergoes a massive, mandated turnover from traditional incandescent lamps to more energy-efficient ones.” The piece was accompanied by an erroneous info-graphic which claimed that the L Prize winner would actually cost $5 more over ten years than the incandescent bulbs it was intended to replace. Later it turned out that the paper’s math was off by a factor of ten. In subsequent online editions the graphic was corrected to read that the bulb would in fact save users more than $100. Senator Bingaman wrote to the editor remonstrating about the inaccuracies the article contained. “People aren’t used to thinking of light bulbs that pay them back in savings,” his letter concluded, “but technology is changing the way we live — and the way we save.” But by then the damage had been done, at least in the eyes of those who believed that government could never get anything right.

  Among those most delighted by the success of the L Prize was Jim Brodrick, the unassuming Department of Energy functionary charged with running the contest, as well as all other DoE-sponsored solid-state lighting programs. The competition had been, Brodrick thought, a wonderfully efficient way of leveraging precious taxpayer dollars. “I doubt I could fund R&D projects for ten million and get the same result,” he told me. To those who believed that bureaucracies were by definition bloated and the bureaucrats who ran them faceless, Brodrick came as a flesh-and-blood rebuttal. The family name was a giveaway, the twinkle in Brodrick’s eye confirmed his Irish-American heritage. His characteristically cheerful grin seemed to acknowledge he was in on the joke that, so far from being overmanned, his staff at the DoE consisted of just one person — himself.

  Jim Brodrick hailed from the tiny [2013 population: 3,606] northern Pennsylvania town of Mansfield. The municipality’s proud boast was that, in 1892, it had been the first place to host a night football game under electric lights, invented just 13 years earlier by Thomas Edison. When he became manager of the department’s LED program in 2000, Brodrick had no prior experience with lighting. A mechanical engineer by training, he had worked on heating and cooling equipment. Energy efficiency had always been his thing, improving systems so that they ran more efficiently; then, later, at the Gas Research Institute in Chicago, analyzing products and technologies to determine whether they were a good investment for utilities. Brodrick had worked for the DoE’s Building Technologies Program for more than twenty years. Though not originally a lighting person and not a politician, during his long career at the department he had learned many lessons that would come in handy shepherding the development of LED technology.

  The DoE’s goal was to save energy. Any technology which promised to do that fell under its mandate. Brodrick was enthusiastic about the potential for change that LEDs represented. “Very few technologies I’ve seen over the past forty years can actually turn the national consumption curve down,” he liked to say. “Most of them change the trajectory, the slope changes a little, that’s the best they can do.” Solidstate lighting, by contrast, was “a huge opportunity to save an immense amount of energy.” The DoE’s LED program started out humble, a couple of research projects costing just $500,000 a year for both. By the mid 2000s, as funding from the government’s energy bill started to flow, Brodrick’s annual budget increased to around $25 million, enough to sponsor perhaps sixty projects. That was still not much, compared to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s overall spend of $1.4 billion. Limited resources forced Brodrick to be strategic in how he allocated money. He saw DoE funding as “spice” sprinkled to “pep up” deserving topics. “We put it here and there just in certain places, not every topic,” he explained, “because commercial companies will fill in where we don’t fund.”

  One item Brodrick
tried to avoid spending money on was staff. “I’m the only one in Washington,” he told me. He was highly selective about whom he chose for his team. “I have most of my people on the outside, because we can’t move at the speed of government.” It appeared that Brodrick was backed by a huge organization, but “the reality is he’s kind of like a puppet master,” commented Chuck Berghoff, CEO of SSL startup OptoElectronix. “He’s got a cadre of consultants who are always there and if you don’t ask a few questions, you presume that they all work for him, that they’re all US government employees, when in fact they’re all independent contractors,” Berghoff said, adding “Jim’s just done a phenomenal job of connecting and networking the solid-state side of lighting with the fixtures side, which are two very different worlds in many respects.”

  Brodrick did everything he could to speed up the pace of development, “to get activities out into the private sector, because [the companies] will move fast, especially if they can make money.” The DoE had the opportunity to make a difference, but it had to be quick because, as he put it, “the concrete’s starting to set.” Things might be headed in the right direction, but the lighting industry still needed a nudge from government. “You gotta act now,” he emphasized, “and that’s not fun in a bureaucracy.” When research projects failed to deliver, Brodrick did not hesitate to pull the plug on them. “We are the one of the very few programs in the EE Office that cuts projects,” he said. His willingness to call a spade a spade, to recognize when a technology was not ready for the real world, did not win him many friends. “See, the government’s supposed to be the sugar daddy,” he told me, “we aren’t, and they don’t like that — but I want results.”

  Most program managers at the department were single-minded in their concerns. The science-oriented ones wanted nothing to do with anything other than basic research; their engineering-oriented colleagues only involved themselves with products. Brodrick was unusual in that his interests ran the gamut from fundamental research all the way to the marketplace. His goal was not only to develop the technology, but also to launch and develop the market, a highly unusual attitude for a government agency. He organized accordingly. “Because the technology keeps moving and the market situation keeps changing, I designed programs so that there was an R&D component and a market component.”

  To ensure everyone was up-to-date with the latest goings-on, Brodrick took pains to bring people together so that they could share their knowledge as widely as possible. His intent was to be “a fair broker” of information, to be inclusive, to stay in constant touch, and to provide concerned individuals with a forum in which they had a voice. To this end he ran three workshops a year, all around the country, each attended by hundreds of interested parties. Prior to the workshops, he held smaller, byinvitation-only round tables consisting of maybe only twenty people, drawn from interest groups such as utilities and lighting designers, to garner their thoughts. These proved very popular with participants. “We’re asking them to tell us stuff, and we listen very carefully,” Brodrick said. Based on what he heard, Brodrick would make alterations every six months: “We’re constantly changing, adding new programs, or elements of programs.” In addition to creating roadmaps on every conceivable topic, Brodrick also sent out a weekly email to 6,000 subscribers. “It’s only about 75 words long,” he said, adding with a chuckle, “hard to believe that a bureaucrat can write that short.” In addition, SSL Postings was an online newsletter - “my little blurb,” Brodrick self-deprecatingly called it - in which he broadcast to the community his thoughts and opinions on topical subjects. This, too, was highly unusual in government (“they don’t necessarily like you to be opinionated”). But Brodrick believed it was important to let people know there was a real person there, someone they could interact with, not some anonymous functionary.

  Several key members of Brodrick’s team were based on the opposite side of the country, at an outpost of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory housed in a fin-de-siècle office block in downtown Portland, Oregon. The connection was established in 2006, after the lab published a report which laid out lessons to be learned from the compact fluorescent fiasco. At one of Brodrick's early roundtables, lighting designers discussed the CFL report. “They gave us lots of hints,” he recalled. In particular, the designers insisted on the need for early accountability on products, something that had been lacking with CFLs. Out of their comments sprang one of the department’s most successful programs. It was called CALiPER, which stood for Commercially-Available LED Product Evaluation and Reporting. “Jim saw the need for monitoring the products that were being offered for sale in the market, for accurately measuring their performance and reporting that to the market, and for using the information gotten from that testing to influence his decisions on what was going on in R&D,” said Marc Ledbetter, the leader of the PNNL group in Portland.

  CALiPER bought off-the-shelf products, tested them, then published the results on its website. It quickly became clear that manufacturers were overselling, claiming performance that was not being achieved by their products. “Some of the first LED products were pretty scary,” Brodrick recalled. In charge of testing at the PNNL facility in Richland was a highly energetic, hockey-playing engineer named Mia Paget, known by her team as “the bulldog” on account of her tenacious nature. “She’s a very driven woman who has taken this program and really run with it,” Ledbetter said admiringly. CALiPER started in 2006. By 2010 more than half of the 350 LED products it had tested were found to have misleading claims. Typically the issue was light output: the label would say it was a 60-watt replacement when in fact it could only manage the equivalent of a 25-watt incandescent source. The program had a salutary effect on manufacturers. Following publication of a report on the CALiPER website, Brodrick would receive calls from the vice-presidents of engineering at companies responsible for the products. “They’d say, we’re disappointed, but we’re gonna drop this, and move on to the next generation, and you’ll get better performance.” Thus was created a virtuous circle, one that cost very little. “That was pretty cheap for DoE wasn’t it?” a delighted Brodrick commented. “We started seeing significant changes in how manufacturers were characterizing their products once we stepped in in that role,” Ledbetter added. “Very encouragingly, we noticed that the manufacturers were committed to producing high-quality products … we also started seeing frequent references to our results at conferences and in the trade press. And so CALiPER is, I think, a huge success.”

  “It’s been a great service to the industry, separating the wheat from the chaff,” noted veteran LED analyst Bob Steele. “Because in a new industry like this there are charlatans, people trying to make a quick buck, and a lot of users have been burned.” Overall, “the Department of Energy in general and Jim Brodrick in particular have done a great job,” Steele went on. “They do a lot for a relatively modest amount of money. I don’t know of anyone in any other country that comes close to what they’re doing.” Kevin Dowling agreed: “Surprisingly - and many Europeans have acknowledged this - the US has been significantly ahead of European initiatives on LEDs and solid-state lighting. Which is a bit strange, because when you look at most sustainability issues Europe has usually been in the vanguard. I think the reason was the very pro-active stance on the part of the Department of Energy and in particular Jim Brodrick.”

  Out of CALiPER sprang another market education initiative, called LED Lighting Facts. Although now used on almost every LED light bulb package, this is a voluntary labelling program aimed at consumers, to help them evaluate the products at the point of purchase. It was inspired by the nutrition label used by the government to inform consumers about food. The first version was drafted by Dowling. “I thought the existing label for food was a pretty good one,” he explained. “So I wrote an HTML script to generate a similar table to describe LED sources.” Hitherto the only number that most people knew with regard to light bulbs was their wattage. In retrospect, it seems odd to rate a bulb i
n terms of the power it consumes rather than the light it emits. The LED Lighting Facts label lists the five most important parameters used to determine photometric performance and efficiency. Top of the list comes light output (in lumens), followed by power (in watts), efficacy (lumens per watt), color accuracy (color rendering index, CRI, a measure of how faithfully colors are revealed by the source), and light color (correlated color temperature, CCT, given both numerically, in degrees Kelvin, and descriptively, as “warm white/bright white/daylight”). The information on the label is based on actual testing at independent labs whose results were provided by bulb makers to the DoE for verification. Thus Lighting Facts represented, according to Marci Sanders, the program’s manager, “a declaration by the manufacturers that they were being honest about what the performance is.” That in turn led to truthful advertising. “Once you hold manufacturers to an accuracy in reporting, they are a little less likely to run out and make claims that are off from the actual performance,” Sanders told me. Details of the products by category, together with their performance data, were published on the Lighting Facts website. Such openness was, Sanders thought, characteristic of Brodrick’s programs: “everything’s right there, everything’s accessible, there’s nothing you have to order.”

  Asked in 2015 which of his department’s accomplishments he was most proud of, Brodrick replied, “the effect that DoE’s focus on quality has had on the SSL market, which has avoided a repeat of what happened when CFLs were first introduced. The early CFLs had quality issues and came with exaggerated claims, which delayed consumer acceptance by 15 years. DoE took those lessons very much to heart, which is why we’ve prodded the SSL industry to admit and correct problems with its products and to keep performance claims accurate. As a result, the rate of adoption for SSL has been very much faster than for CFLs in the early days.” A good start, to be sure. But to achieve the ultimate goal - ubiquity - there was still a long way to go.