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Military Orders The new series of novels from Martin Roth In the Middle Ages, military orders like the Templars defended Christians and fought for justice. Now, in Martin Roth's latest series of novels, a church has established a clandestine new military order, to fight for today's persecuted Christians.... |
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Introduction to Investing in Lighting Stocks
Lighting is responsible for a massive one-eighth (some estimates would say that it is more like one-quarter) of our planet's electric power use. Most lighting comes from electric incandescence or fluorescence. Both use a lot of power. Energy-efficient lighting could dramatically lower power use.
Lighting of the future is likely to come from LED (light-emitting diode) technology, which uses markedly less electricity than existing lighting. These are lights that are based on semiconductor technology. As with semiconductors, the first ones were hugely expensive and did not always work so well. And like semiconductors, prices have been falling quite dramatically while efficiency rises.
Moore's Law - propounded by Intel founder Gordon Moore - states that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip will double about every two years. In tandem with this is Haitz's Law, which states that LED brightness doubles about every two years.
Nevertheless, LEDs remain pricey - although they last far longer than normal lightbulbs - and many believe the quality of their light is inferior to regular incandescent light bulbs.
Still, the trend is strongly towards LED, thanks to its energy-saving advantages. Some governments have already announced plans to ban incandescent lightbulbs. An analysis by the research firm Strategies Unlimited forecast that the LED market would rise from $4.2 billion in 2006 to $9 billion in 2011.
That is why some of the leading companies in LEDs are big global lighting manufacturers like General Electric, Siemens and Philips. They can spot the trend.
Cree is more of a pure play in this industry, manufacturing residential and commercial LED lighting, as well as products for electronic displays, automobiles and other applications.
April 7th, 2008