The L Prize: A prize for lighting innovation
May 30, 2008Lynne Kiesling
As authorized by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced the Bright Tomorrow Lighting competition, the L Prize (here’s the prize website). Cash prizes and other inducements for the development of solid state lighting to replace standard incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.
Rather like the Google Lunar X Prize, but with taxpayer money instead of private money.
Solid-state lighting is a big deal. The light is emitted from a block of semiconductor material instead of in a vacuum in a tube or by exciting a gas in a tube. If you have any LED lights, that’s an example of solid-state lighting. They use very little energy per lumen of light, and they emit very little waste heat.
There are a couple of academic research centers working on solid-state lighting, and there are some companies that offer solid-state lighting. Mass-market solid-state lighting is not there yet.
I have my concerns about government research funding crowding out private research funding, particularly when we get in this murky area that is moving toward commercialization research. I also have my doubts about the assertion in the DOE’s solid-state lighting strategy statement that “its unique attributes drive the need for a coordinated approach that guides technology advances from laboratory to marketplace”.
However, if the alternative to this kind of policy is command-and-control technology standards and building standards, then this prize-based policy is more likely to generate effective, commercializable solid-state lighting. At least it stipulates the performance objectives without stipulating how the technology is to achieve those objectives (other than the technologies having to be solid-state).
I think that’s the real on-the-ground realpolitik comparison to make, although I also think that we should not ignore the crowding out question (especially as fuel prices and electricity prices rise).
Can you explain more about the crowding-out in this case?