What are the obstacles for LED becoming truly general lighting?

Strategies Unlimited believes the LED lighting market will grow by 28% from 2008 to 2012, but many challenges remain.

As the LED lighting market grows beyond single color and color-changing applications into general illumination applications such as residential, commercial and off-grid applications, and ultimately into outdoor area applications, it is forecast to exceed $5 billion in 2012, corresponding to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28% from 2008 to 2012.

That looks very promising but I think that there are still a lot of obstacles for preventing this promising adoption number to come true!

First, the LED efficiency is just around 26% with the best LED chip we have, still 74% of the energy will be inevitably converted to heat energy so there we can see that all LED direct replacement light bulb comes with a heat sink which may the cost higher and looks clumsy. Of course they are better design like Parathom and Master LED from Osram and Philips respectively.

2nd challenge is that say one of the world largest CFL and LED maker Osram has 50 factories. Amongst them, two of them are for LED, rest of them is CFL and incandescent light fixture, Does these two factories will be promoted by their top management for expansion and force the other 48 factories to lose market share and close in the end.

The LED replacement fixture is far less bright as the Traditional energy saving lamp. I am using LED fixture at home, but My study place is still a single Energy Lamp as it is brighter. So not until a LED of efficacy of 200 lm/watt is launched, the LED replacement lamp will not be as popular as these CFL are today!

In recent years, LED technology has made impressive performance gains, which in turn have improved the efficacy of LED lighting fixtures. In the forecast period 2008-2012, white LED fixtures will make gains in market share as the best commercially available high-performance white LEDs move beyond luminous efficacies of 100 l/W.

Another way of being a obstacle is that how to prevent theft of the Expensive LED in the office or factory, a reasonable good quality LED lamp is valued $30-60 and that is a tempting for people who might risk stealing the LED light whenever that is an opportunity for using it at his house!
So only the new building that has a ne fixture that come with special design to prevent the light bulb to be easily been removed would reduce or prevent them to be “Lost”! Means that the market for LED directly replacement bulb would be much smaller than we expect...

The LED directly replace for CFL is still expensive, well 5 years ago it is 80 times more expensive than energy Light bulb. Now that is 10-15 times more expensive, not until it is 3-5 times more expensive, the popularity of the LED direct replacement bulbs will not be Popular!

The angle of light emission of LED light bulb is till narrow as comparing with the energy light bulb which is practically 360 degrees. LED is around 80-120 Degrees with larger the emission angle, the less the average light output.

However, this will be only the beginning for the ultimate replacement of conventional light sources, including high-efficiency fluorescent and HID fixtures. However, many challenges face the LED industry to accomplish that goal, all of which are discussed in a new report released by Strategies Unlimited.

“LED lighting Fixtures – Market Analysis and Forecast” provides a detailed assessment of the market drivers and challenges faced by the LED lighting fixture industry in penetrating the general illumination market. It provides application analyses and forecasts for nine lighting market segments through 2012.

Let's work harder for achieving the goal!

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