There cannot be life without light. Everything human beings do, and experience depends on light. Another interesting fact is that all energy in the world started as light. For example, fossil fuels originate from past sunlight. White fuel is generated by the sunlight of today and the future.
How does light support life?
In that sense, when you look at the light in human evolution, you will notice that human life began to accelerate with the invention of fire which provided a way to prepare different meals and a way to move around the planet and thus evolve.
From fire, there is a shift to modern artificial light. It is not more than a century ago that human beings could light their environment for the first time with artificial electrical lights. If you look at society, it was only about 200 years ago in the 1800s when the human population crossed the one billion people mark.
Interestingly, only three percent, about 30 million people, lived in cities, with 97% lived in rural areas. These days the larger population lives in urban areas.
The science of light
The year 1015 is known as the year of light because the scientist Ibn Al Haythem wrote the first Book of Optics. In 1815, Fresnel looked more into the nature of light, where the theory of light as a wave began.
In 1865, Maxwell came up with the idea of electromagnetic waves and Einstein’s theory of general relativity which discussed light in space and time happened in 1915. Finally, in the late 1900s, the application of light in communication through optical fiber technology started.
The history of light sources
The birth of the first electric light source happened in the late 19th century, which was also the first electric appliance. Beyond incandescent light bulbs, no other electric mass product existed. If you look at the evolution from then onwards, things continued to accelerate.
The decades after the incandescent light bulbs, several families of gas discharge lamps enabled lighting in many forms and shapes. However, lighting technology is still accelerating. Nowadays, there are Light-Emitting Diode bulbs that illuminate spaces.
Looking at efficiencies from original incandescent lights of 10lm/W to 200lm/W for LED lighting, efficiency has dramatically increased beyond imagination to accommodate modern lighting technologies.
The importance of electric light sources
Looking at the past and the recent present, light is everywhere. It is where you live, food depends on it, it allows communication, and it is how people study signs in health and education. Still, something needs to change.
Mainly, there are different challenges and strains that human beings face in their lives since ten years ago. If you looked back about a decade ago, when enhancements on energy efficiency occurred, the first evidence-based studies came out on global warming.
For this reason, people looked into what is relevant in terms of energy, like prices, shortages, which is still the primary concern for many people today. Climate change conferences are still happening to understand the status of the world with regards to energy sources.
Energy and climate change
Over ten years ago, people started looking at how lighting can be part of the solution. It is a fact that lighting consumes about 19% of total global electricity. Light is thus a homogenous sector in terms of electricity consumption, so people need to move to more efficient lighting.
Next to climate change, the rise in energy prices is an important reason to reduce consumption because those are a burden on national, corporate, and household budgets. More than half of the energy budget is lighting for many cities, which decreases by two-thirds or more if people move to better technology.
Importance of energy-efficient lighting
Developing countries are constantly evaluating whether they have enough energy to power the growing population 24/7. Economic growth is another drive for chance: Products and solutions become more competitive if people become more efficient.
If governments did more to promote energy efficiency, there would be job opportunities for the youth, improving infrastructure and lowering energy budgets. In December 2006, the legislation of global phase-out for incandescent light bulbs began. This staggering drove the change to promote energy efficiency.Energy is a large part of the environment. It would help if you strived to install sustainable systems like LEDs that encourage efficiency. For commercial heavy purposes, there are companies like Phoenix heavy duty lighting solutions providing customised lighting arrangements based on the business need.
