Obama Speaks at Cree

It started in 1993.

Ross Perot was debating NAFTA with Al Gore on Larry King live. Mr. Perot was talking about the great sucking sound of jobs going to Mexico and he mentioned how a major ballast manufacturer had moved their manufacturing to Mexico… “while their CEO lives in Bel Air, Larry…” For the most part, our industry has not had much attention from politicians. However, your humble editor did get to ask Senator Hillary Clinton a question about dimming streetlights during her Q&A at the 2006 Washington Clean-Tech conference, which she hit it out of the park. The democratic candidates for president earlier sparred at a debate regarding CFL lamps.

Today, Senator Barrack Obama addressed workers at CREE in Raleigh, North Carolina. He gave his standard stump speech, and only mentioned lighting once during his talk. However, before he took questions he invited ‘Neil’, (it was not clear who Neil was) to demonstrate ‘how this gizmo’ works—pointing to the LED. Neil demonstrated the 65 watt incandescent lamp, and then switched on the 10.5 watt LED. A typical layman, not knowing our industry, would typically ask the price of this new LED technology. However, Senator Obama, played along and asked the question which our industry loves. “What is the payback” he asked. “About 14 months,” answered Neil.

I did some quick math. 55 watts saved x $.08Kwh x 4300 hours/1000, the savings would be $18.92 per year. So at 12 hours per day, and a 14 month payback, the cost of the LED replacement lamp would be about $22—not bad, but still out of the reach of mainstream. Neil went on to say that Fluorescent is a good stopgap, but cautioned the audience about Mercury in Fluorescent lamps.

Neither Neil nor Obama mentioned anything about the rather violent production process sometimes used to etch LED’s.