Examples of early adoption
In 2009 the exceptionally large Christmas tree standing in front of the Turku Cathedral in Finland was hung with 710 LED lamps, each using 2 watts. It has been calculated that these LED lamps paid for themselves in three and a half years, even though the lights run for only 48 days per year.In 2008 Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, US, was able to light its new factory interior and exterior almost solely with LEDs. Initial cost was three times that of a traditional mix of incandescent and fluorescent lamps, but the extra cost was recovered within two years via electricity savings, and the lamps should not need replacing for 20 years. In 2009 the Manapakkam, Chennai office of the Indian IT company, iGate, spent ₹3,700,000 (US$80,000) to light 57,000 sq ft (5,300 m2) of office space with LEDs. The firm expected the new lighting to pay for itself fully within 5 years.
In 2009 a new highway (A29) was inaugurated in Aveiro, Portugal, it included the first European public LED-based lighting highway.
By 2010 mass installations of LED lighting for commercial and public uses were becoming common. LED lamps were used for a number of demonstration projects for outdoor lighting and LED street lights. The United States Department of Energy made several reports available on the results of many pilot projects for municipal outdoor lighting, and many additional streetlight and municipal outdoor lighting projects soon followed.
The two simplest methods of producing white light LEDs are RGB or phosphor. RGB or trichromatic white LEDs uses multiple LED chips emitting red, green, and blue wavelengths. These outputs combine to produce white light. The color rendering index (CRI) is poor, typically 25 - 65, due to the narrow range of wavelengths emitted.General-purpose lighting needs white light. LEDs emit light in a very narrow band of wavelengths, emitting light of a color characteristic of the energy bandgap of the semiconductor material used to make the LED. To emit white light from LEDs requires either mixing light from LEDs of various colors, or using a phosphor to convert some of the light to other colors.
The second basic method uses LEDs in conjunction with a phosphor to produce complementary colors from a single LED. The most common method is to combine a blue LED with a yellow phosphor, producing a narrow range of blue wavelengths and a broad band of "yellow" wavelengths actually covering the spectrum from green to red. The CRI value can range from less than 70 to over 90, although a wide range of commercial LEDs of this type have a color rendering index around 82.
The colors available from both the basic types of white light LED is adjustable to a certain extent, with color temperatures in the range of 2,200 K (matching incandescent lamps) up to 7,000 K are widely available. Higher CRI values can be obtained using more than three LED colors to cover a greater range of wavelengths. Tunable lighting systems employ banks of colored LEDs that can be individually controlled, either using separate banks of each color, or multi-chip LEDs with the colors combined and controlled at the chip level.
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