Penny per lumen. It's a good slogan and one Mark Swoboda, CEO of LED maker Bridgelux, says his company will live up to early next year. In early 2009, the company plans to release a series of white light LEDs that will allow manufacturers to make LED light fixtures that cost 50 percent less than current LED fixtures, he said in an interview. The discount might even be larger. One of Bridgelux's white light LEDs that exhibits a "cool" light will cost around 1 cent per lumen. An 85-lumen LED, therefore, would cost about 85 cents in volume and a number would be packaged together to make a light. Similar white LEDs with neutral and warm light coming out at the same time will cost about twice as much. Cool, neutral and warm correspond to the quality of the light: "cool" is the clinical tone is the type you see emanating from LED flashlights (as well as those bodily probes the aliens use for their medical exams.) Warm light is far preferred by customers: incandescent bulbs put out a warm light. Why the price hike? Warm and neutral LEDs require different components. Although not as big as solar, lighting has become one of the larger segments of the greentech market. In the second quarter, Bridgelux announced it had raised $40 million ($30 million in private equity and $10 million in loans). Other lighting companies that have recently raised money include HID Laboratories (controllers), Luxim (plasma lights), Nuventix (air cooling for LEDs) and Luminus Devices. The credit crunch, and a possible invasion of computer companies in the light market, however, could change the way the market develops. Some believe these new companies will be absorbed by the existing giants like Lumileds. Swoboda will speak on these issues and more at Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity on November 17. Cost remains one of the major barriers to LED adoption. LEDs consume less power than conventional lights and can last 50,000 hours or more, far longer than conventional bulbs. Lower power and maintenance costs can actually make LEDs cheaper than regular bulbs in applications like streetlights. Consumers, though, have a tough time choking down $90 or more for a 60 watt equivalent LED bulb at Home Depot. A dimmer LED bulb from Toshiba recently put on sale in Japan costs $360. The price ceiling on an LED bulb, he speculated, is probably around $25. Bridgelux believes it has found a path to reduce cost through how it manufactures and packages LEDs. Much of the company's intellectual property is bound up in the expitaxial processes of building the phosphor-coated film. Bridgelux will also target its LEDs to specific markets and applications. To date, most LED makers have produced chips for an undifferentiated market, although that has begun to change. "We want to focus on an end-market application. You need to look at the quality of light, the quantity of light, the power threshold, the costs," he said. "We are trying to sell a product that doesn't look or sound like an LED."

Think of Dynamic Power Capping from Hewlett-Packard as a circuit breaker for the circuit breaker. The company has devised a technology (embodied in software and hardware) that effectively prevents servers and other equipment from exceeding a pre-set electrical threshold and thus tripping the breakers. If a datacenter (or some portion of a large one) is only supposed to get 1,000 kilowatts of power, that's all it will get. Setting a finite limit on power consumption in turn allows datacenter managers to reduce their margin of error, explained Peter Gross, CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company that designs datacenters. (Hewlett-Packard bought it and made EYP a subsidiary.) Now, if a couple of server rows need 500 kilowatts, an IT manager might provision 1,000 kilowatts to it in order to cushion against unforeseen spikes. As a result, a lot of power is going to waste. With a cap, you can increase the number of servers in a room, reduce power consumption or some combination of the two. Datacenter managers, of course, can re-evaluate their power needs as time goes on. Dynamic Power Capping is part of HP's Thermal Logic portfolio of energy efficiency technologies and services for datacenters, said Gottsegen. HP estimates that the technology can save a company $16 million in a 1 megawatt datacenter in a year. Other companies are working to reduce the power consumption of their products as well, notably IBM, Sun Dell, Yahoo, Google, Intel and Seagate. Starting in early 2006, IT managers began to loudly complain about their electrical bills: coming out with energy efficient servers and PCs in turn became one of the more popular ways to market a computer. Power bills have also help spur demand for thin clients. (See aesthetically intriguing video that will challenge your assumptions about modern cinema here.) Some companies are considering building datacenters in Iceland because of the prevalence of geothermal power and free cool air, Gross told me. Air conditioning consumes about half the power going into datacenters. “Datacenters will use more power than a small town with 20,000 to 30,000 households,� Gross said. “It is becoming the most glaring element of energy consumption in a corporation.� A modern data center can cost $200 to $300 million to build and stock with power supplies and air conditioners. Datacenters a few years ago consumed about 25 watts per square foot. Then in 2004 and 2005 the figure shot up to 52 watts per square foot. Blame it on multi-core chips and virtualization software. These increase computing utility but also increase the power density. The average server cabinet at a typical large company will consume 2 to 3 kilowatts. One at a search engine will gobble up 8.5 to 9 kilowatts.