If you clicked on the link to the GTA website and looked at the selection of transactions you will see a fair number of optical communications focused clients. Around 2002 we began looking at other market segment that might benefit from what turned out to be an over-investment in the communications sector during the prior years. One of the markets that intrigued us was solid-state lighting. We began scouring the landscape for companies that were attempting to make laser based lighting solutions an economic alternative to the then standard incandescent light bulb. There were many companies pursuing light emitting diode (LED) based solutions because if the hurdles could be cleared the energy cost savings would be monumental.
I was looking earlier today at a Worldwatch Institute note on lighting that said as much as 34% of U.S. electricity goes to lighting. The the standard incandescent light bulb only converts one tenth of the electricity it consumes to light, dissipating the rest to heat. Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are helping make modest strides in cutting the consumers’ power consumption given they use a third the power, but the numbers we’ve heard on solid state light are a tenth the power.
Oil can stay at $55 a barrel and we can temporarily fall back in love with our gas guzzlers, but finding a way to overcome the hurdles to a country lite by solid state lighting systems could cut the U.S. lighting bill to less than a quarter of what it is today and it is a savings that every American bill payer will understand and embrace. It is a move the government should get behind.
So why are we talking about this? Last week we sat down with Lynk Labs. It is a company we first met in the spring of 2004. We were intregued by an LED drive technology they were pursuing that would allow LED lighting systems to plug right into the existing electrical infrastructure. That was not possible at the time and created a hurdle for solid-state lighting that promised to slow the adoption of the technology. The good news we heard during our update from the CEO is that he is not having to be as much of an evangelist these days and is spending a lot more time trying to figure out how to ramp up his business to support growing demand from customers.
The ups and downs of oil prices may cause an ebb and flow of enthusiasm for alternative energy projects over the next couple of years, but the shock of $140 a barrel oil and what it meant to heating our homes and driving our cars has changed the psychology consumers and energy efficient alternatives. Solid-state lighting looks like an increasingly probable path for the U.S. to mine energy savings and we are hunting for more interesting companies like Lynk Labs to keep tabs on that we might be able serve down the road.
