LED Tree Shines On

My neighbor has an LED lit evergreen tree that continues to shine on well into the new year. I figured I would capture this before it is taken down. Remarkably energy efficient, these here LED lights draw very little energy while producing vivid brilliant colors that pop! Imagine if all artificial lights were as efficient as light emitting diodes.... 

Every Light an LED

If every artificial light in the world used this same LED technology, we could save billions of KWH of power, enough to recharge hundreds of millions of electric cars every night with no changes to existing infrastructure. In the future, when electric cars become more popular, all of that extra off peak night time grid energy saved by LED's and other efficient lighting technology can be used to charge up electric car batteries.

There is already enough off peak night time grid power available to charge millions of electric cars without adding any additional power plants. Much of this off peak power is wasted or lost right now because we lack a feasible effective way to store huge amounts of grid power.

Artificial lights come on before the night time off peak interval. In the evening when everyone gets home from work there is what is called the evening peak. This is when people turn on their artificial lights, consumer electronics, cooking apparatuses and other power consuming appliances. When people come home from work in an electric car, and plug it back in, this adds more loading to the evening peak. Fortunately most vehicle chargers are most electric vehicles have built in charge times to allow their customers to take advantage of the lower night time off peak power rates in many areas of the world. Setting the charge timer to charge later in the evening after the evening peak will held to address this issue.

About the Image: 
Shot at ISO 3200 for 1/20 of a second at F4.5 on a Canon S95 : Extensively edited with GIMP and ShotWell to clean up the image.