“Resonet,” a public art project based in the United Kingdom used LEDs in a highly creative way. The Resonet lights up based upon resonant frequencies in its surrounding environment. This is an interesting example of how LEDs – used in our solar lamp project – can be used in many more creative and imaginative ways. You can visit the Resonet website here.

The answer – according to experts at this week’s Strategies in Light conference in Silicon Valley – is that LEDs are still an emerging technology.  During a conference segment on “Overcoming Solid-State Lighting Challenges Today,” experts spoke of some of the many challenges LEDs still face – inconsistency in their manufacture, brightness output and wide-ranging, largely obtuse claims being made about their performance which may be true for some LEDs – but not for others.

According to experts attending the Strategies in Light Conference, LEDs with inconsistent quality are often widely found among those manufactured in mainland China.  For example, out of over 200 LEDs tested from 20 different vendors in China by a Humbolt University Project – over 80% did not meet brightness metrics claimed by the manufacturer and over 20% were only fulfilling about 10% of the brightness requirements.  Moreover, the widely made claim that you will get 50,000 hours out of an LED was at one point described as “NASA-quality” by a representative from a well-known silicon manufacturing company.

So what will we see from LEDs in 2008?  More performance, better output, more efficiency – but on top of that, managed expectations.  Over the past 5 years, LEDs have been widely publicized – but these publications have been often built on generating excitement and seldom detailed enough.  For example, what does 50,000 hours even mean?  In some LEDs that may be a hypothetical number that perhaps 10% of a batch may be able to achieve.  We will see better standardizations and better protections put in place so that your 2008 LED Christmas lights will hopefully come out looking pure clear white – not half white/green and half white/blue as with what happened to my family this past year!

Overall don’t lose faith in LEDs and if you go with LEDs be willing to pay for quality – it’s quality that gives the longer lifetime and higher efficiency.  Products which promise the same for less should be subject to your skepticism.

But instead of letting all of that exhaust into the atmosphere, it stays in the balloon.  Then, when the balloon is full, put it somewhere safe, maybe deep underground or in the ocean.  But don’t try this at home, you’ll look like a weirdo and the balloon will probably pop.  Typically carbon capturing is done in fossil fuel (oil and coal) power plants.  And they don’t use balloons, they use something tough, made out of metal – sort of like a big industrial sized propane tank.  Vattenfall’s process improves carbon capturing for coal – which is great news for the U.S. where coal burning power plants produce about 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 per year, according to the article, and debates have sparked about coal’s health effects over recent years.