The Plummeting Cost of Light
2GreenEnergy super-supporter Gary Tulie sent me this incredible article on the falling cost of light over the millennia.
My first thought when I saw it was that I would skim through it, since the subject matter may seem fairly obvious. But I found it extremely worthwhile, not only for its helping us understand exactly how artificial lighting went from something too expensive to use to something too cheap to care about, but also for its economic analysis that shows the difficulty in measuring large-scale changes (like this one) on an apples-to-apples basis. Great stuff.
It may be that LEDs will replace all other light sources except where operating in extreme heat is required, such as in ovens and clothes dryers where incandescent lights may continue to be used.
On the East Coast we have many buildings designed before the middle of the last century. They had court yards and skylights to bring natural lighting into the interior of the buildings. The buildings were designed around the natural environment.
But cheap oil along with artificial lighting, and HVAC systems allowed the building of cheaper windowless boxes. Industrial parks are now full of such buildings. Technology can be economical but I sometimes wonder what we have given up by spending 1/3 of our lives in such man-made caves.
There is also class issue. The argument that such cave boxes are more economical may not trickle down to the worker level. The executive gets a room with a view while the factory worker might never see the light of day. Perhaps then this is an argument that technology should lift up the human condition rather than enable it to be enslaved.