SAN FRANCISCO -- Here's an idea for getting around the onerous cost of LED lights.

Leasing.

Lemmis Lighting and Green Ray, two startups with LED replacement lights, want to sell their products under a lease-to-own option, execs said at West Coast Green taking place in San Francisco this week.

Lemnis wants roll out the light-as-a-service model with its 6 watt/60 watt equivalent bulb. Consumers buy a ten pack of bulbs and pay $12 a year for three years. After that, they own the bulbs. The bulbs should save consumers $12 or more a year in power bills, so effectively, they are free, says founder Warner Philips. (He's as close to lighting royalty as you can get. His great-grandfather started Philips Lighting and hawked bulbs across Europe and Russia in the early days of electricity.) The company will also replace any bulbs that burn out in the first three years.

Meanwhile, Green Ray sells its fluorescent tube replacement under a four-year lease. The total cost is about $75.

Will this work? It does take the sting out of going with LEDs. Toshiba last year came out with a 100 watt dimmable LED bulb. It costs about $360. Not many people are going to snap up something like that at Home Depot when they could get a giant gas barbecue for less money.

Still, quality control will be a big issue. While Green Ray's bulb blasts out light pretty well, Lemnis' seemed a little dim. But I hope to try one out in home conditions soon.

Just a reminder: lighting consumes 22 percent of the electricity in the U.S. and 25 percent of the total energy in commercial buildings. Consumers account for 4 percent of the energy in commercial buildings. You'd have to put six computers at every desk to make the power consumed by computers equal to what the lights are gobbling up.