 This is Howard Wigg, Sink Tech Hawaii Cold Green. We have a very enlightening show for you today called Lighting the Way to Super Efficiency, and my guest today is Howard Wigg. Oh, how did that happen? Well, stranger things have happened. I had a guest today, very distinguished, and he just couldn't make it, but lighting efficiency is my passion, and I get to talk about it, and hopefully it's going to, super lighting efficiency is going to appear in the form of an amended state law pretty gosh darned soon. So a little bit of background. Anybody who was a climate denier, I think, given the events of the last month, has ceased to be a climate denier. Wildfires raging through Greece, Spain, 116 degrees, and how about our good old U.S. of A are cool, moist, Pacific Northwest ablaze, and up in our neighboring Canada, nice, cool climate, beautiful in the summer, people literally dying of heat. And in other parts of the world, China comes to mind, flooding, flooding, flooding. The whole Earth's equilibrium is going really, really out of balance. And virtually every scientist worth his soul says this is directly attributable to human activity, mainly the emissions of carbon dioxide or CO2. So what I personally am hoping for, and I know a lot of my colleagues pray for the same thing, is that in the face of these disasters worldwide, that we, the Americans will mobilize the way we did in the beginning of World War II, suddenly Detroit was producing tanks. Every production facility geared themselves toward war. Our grandmothers planted victory gardens so that we could divert as much food as possible to the troops and so forth, so forth. It was a complete mobilization. And that is what we need. That is what Europe needs, what China needs, what Japan needs, complete mobilization. Let's see how much down far we get. Now, what my teeny little niny contribution to that is, is in the form of lighting efficiency. A little background on lighting. Let's see if I can get this image. Yeah, yeah, there it comes, nice and clear. Does that look familiar? Yeah, this is a light bulb as you will recognize, date 1906. Thomas Edison perfected the filament for the Incanis lamp in 1878. By 1906, we had the first grid, which was the Pearl River grid in lower Manhattan, and then it spread out from there. But there was not a whole lot of improvements to lighting quality or lighting efficiency between, say 1906 all the way up to World War II when the fluorescent tubular lamp was invented and began to appear in office buildings and other commercial settings. And that was a great increase in efficiency, but the quality of lighting was very, very poor. And that gradually increased and the efficiency or efficacy, as we say in the lighting world, continued to improve. Then in the 1980s came the compact fluorescent light, fluorescence, but you could screw them into the normal sockets. The first rollout was a disaster. Failure was rampant. They had to pull back for a while and then came back and this time compact fluorescence were very, very nice. So just to give you a few numbers, the incandescent lamp that maybe you didn't, if you're young, maybe you didn't even grow up with incandescent lamps, but you're certain that your parents did yielded in terms of efficiency, lumens per watt, 15 lumens per watt. Think of miles per gallon, say 15 miles per gallon. The tubular fluorescence first yielded about 60 lumens per watt and the compact fluorescence yielded 45, 55 lumens per watt. A nice, nice, nice increase in efficiency compared to the old incandescent and then came LEDs, light emitting diodes. They started out at around 40 lumens per watt and there was a magnificent amount of research and development that went into improving, improving, improving LEDs to the point where today, and I'm going to show you a slide pretty soon, you can't get an LED for at less than 70, 70 lumens per watt. And that leads me to propose a change in the law, namely the international energy conservation code, where here's the definition of a high efficacy lamp and what I've done is cross out references to this type of lamp, that type of lamp, and I simply say lamps with an efficacy, oh high efficacy lamp, definition lamps with an efficacy of not less than 70 lumens per watt and I cross out again the references to all the other lamp types because they're outmoded now, we live in revolutionary times and what this will do is get the energy required to illuminate our homes way, way, way, way, way, way down and another benefit to converting to LEDs is heat. In Hawaii, do we need more heat or less heat in our homes and offices? The answer is very obvious, the incandescent lamp, I used to go around with a demonstration and a heat gun and if you remember Senator Willie Esperro, he was at one of my demonstrations and I gave him the heat gun and I had 100 watt incandescent lit up and I'd say, Senator, please aim the laser at the peak of this lit up incandescent lamp, he got 465 degrees and then I asked at what point ladies when you were girl scouts or girls did you bake cookies and they say about 325 degrees and I say exactly, you've got a whole bunch of mini ovens around in your house, I was living in a boarding house in Santa Barbara, California when I was a freshman, I had UCSB and one of my fellow boarders had left a light on for somebody who was coming in late, a curtain blue sat on the incandescent lamp and the whole boarding house which was wooden just about totally went up in flames, fortunately he had the presence of mind to pull down the curtains and stomp on them, he burned himself in the process but point being incandescent lamps were so hot that it caught fire, it's a genuine fire hazard which leads me to the virtually the only other type of light that is now available in stores besides LEDs, this is screw in, is called the halogen lamp and halogen lamps are incandescent on steroids and they can achieve a temperature of up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, that is hotter than blazes dangerous as heck, do you want 700 degrees floating around in your home, I don't think so and we banned incandescence but the halogens are still efficient enough to be permitted for sale but I don't think based on that that you want to be dealing with that therefore we will have, we are experiencing a wholesale conversion to LED lamps and many of them now get over 100 lumens per watt, compare that to the old 15 lumens per watt, a little bit of background here, we are living in revolutionary times, consider and this has to do basically with the explosion of improvements in electronic technology, take our not so humble iPhone, it contains more information than all of NASA had at the time when NASA put the first man on the moon, I cannot believe what my iPhone does and consider the fact that 15 years ago it didn't even exist and now you will not find a young person without the iPhone in his or her hip pocket, one of my colleagues carries two iPhones with her personal iPhone and her office iPhone at all times she wouldn't be caught dead without it and I know most of you young people out there neither would you be caught dead without your iPhone that's an example of revolution, it did not exist 15 years ago and so it is with the letting world I mentioned the old incandescent and now the LEDs and they're getting better and it's not only the fact that they are super, super efficient and super safe, you can have a big LED lamp leave it on for a while and with trepidation touch it, it's just warm to the touch, there's one reason they're so efficient is they produce a lot more light than heat and the incandescence produce a lot more heat than light so they're safe and they're very, very variable they come in all kinds of flavors when the LEDs first came out they had this garish, whitish, glareish look about them and there's been so much research and development they're just improving, improving, improving you can get any flavor you want now we measure lighting color temperature in degrees kelvin and well it's a fascinating background but I won't go into it but suffice to say the more towards the red a light is the we call that warmer and then the more towards the blue we call that cooler and in degrees kelvin if you have been to the big island and you see these yellow street lights out there those are low pressure sodium very efficient and they yield about 2,000 degrees kelvin and at first again the LEDs were very hilarious they were way over on the blue end of the spectrum now here on Oahu if you remember a few years ago we converted from the old-fashioned street lights to LED street lights and I was very active in helping to select the color temperature and the state went for 4,000 degrees kelvin so the state highways the harbors the airports all are at 4,000 and that's heavy on the blue end and quite glareish but the city the less its heart for the residential streets went over to 3,000 degrees kelvin which is a much softer warmer type of light much easier on the eyes and incidentally we look we human beings look a lot better under 3,000 or even lower than that because regardless of our skin complexion we do have a lot of red in our skin and the cooler temperatures pick up that red and we look a whole heck of a lot better if you go under a 4,000 degree street light you you you just pretty well washed out you have this grayish look about you anyway that's many many the virtues of LED lamps and in hospitals and other healthcare facilities now they are adjusting because these things are so darn flexible they're because the shut-ins don't get to see the outdoors much so in the morning in these facilities they emulate with the LEDs the soft morning light and then towards the middle of the day they crank up the blue crank up the blue so it resembles the noon time sun and then as the afternoon gets older the color goes more and more down towards the red so that the patients or the guests there can enjoy the natural circadian rhythm which they grew up with and which we as homo sapiens grew up with for the last 200,000 years and our homo erectus ancestors have grown up with for millions of years so another virtue of the LEDs but let's if we can bring up the other slide the yeah this guy what I did in proposing this amendment to go over to LED lamps was I compared LEDs with heligens side by side and I spent a lot of time at Lowe's and a lot of time at Home Depot carefully going over these and I did all kinds of analyses but basically what you want to look at is cost premium how much more expensive is an LED lamp compared to a comparable heligin lamp and you'll see three three dollars 93 cents three dollars 17 minus 24 it's actually cheaper and so forth and then for Home Depot on the bottom I do another comparison and we get a cost premium of around three 350 and then I look at the life of the lamp that's another thing but LEDs they just last forever and given the fact that there's a much much lower required wattage well again the ratio is about at least five to one sometimes closer to seven to one so you're using far far far less electricity over that life and you are achieving savings in that chart over the life of generally well over two hundred dollars now let me get this straight you spent a cost premium of say three dollars and 25 cents and after a few years you have saved two hundred and twelve dollars very good the return on investment I'd say speaking of return on investment if we could bring up the chart again now over the extreme right you'll see return on investment three years three months five months instant 1.2 years four months 1.3 months 1.6 years one month so if you put a say a thousand dollars into a bank and you had a comparable savings like that after say four months you would get your thousand dollars back in interest and then in this case it's a 15 year life you'd be getting more and more and more thousands of dollars back in some cases you're getting back 50 five zero times as much in saved energy as compared to the the cost premium that you invested in in the first place and I went to great trouble to analyze that because among the audience that I'm going to be proposing this too is larger building industry and what they are really really concerned about with good reason is lowest first cost they come to me how are housing is so expensive what are you doing to these poor people you're adding to the cost Howard this is more expensive you can't do this and now I will turn around and say to them let's see we're going to spend an extra three dollars and 25 cents oh and what their famous line is Howard the poor young couple the first time home buyer with their little kids you're keeping them from being able to afford their mortgage because you're adding this cost and which point I say yes we are adding a teeny little mini bit more but look at the savings aren't you concerned about this young couple's ability to pay their mortgage their monthly mortgage what if their utility bill is considerably lower then if they had bought inefficient lamps aren't they better able to pay their mortgage of course so Mr. Builder please be concerned about this unfortunate young couple which is struggling struggling struggling and that that's going to be the the back and forth that we have and just a little background on the fact that I'm going to be introducing this as an amendment to the energy code now this exhibit hey let's see if I can get it in wow no that doesn't want to zero and come on come on oh the magic anyway if I could make that into a clear image it would say 2018 IECC international energy conservation code and the way that the building codes were oh let me do a little sidebar on building codes we heard that there was a earthquake going on in Haiti just recently and there was another huge earthquake maybe 10 years ago and the body count is going up and up and up and up and up in Haiti and the previous earthquake I believe caused over 100,000 people to perish guess what Haiti does not have building codes people can theoretically build any old way they want sometimes that happens result earthquake shakes and the buildings fall down people get trapped people die people get injured that is a result of no building codes or very very weak building codes and contrast that to Japan where Tokyo especially has these huge huge tall tall high rises and they're in the middle of earthquake company country why don't those buildings fall down they actually have floating devices way way under the building such that when the earth shifts the amount of shifting is greatly greatly smoothed out by these I think they're liquid devices under those buildings that's the advantage of a super super super advanced building code Haiti an example of virtually no codes whatsoever so I chair the Hawaii Building Code Council and every what happens is every three years all the building codes electrical code seismic code the plumbing code the codes are there yeah anyway all those codes get updated every three years and then they get distributed to the states and the states need to deal with these new codes they can amend them if they want and then in the case of states like Hawaii we adopt them at the state level and then they go to the counties and the counties can in turn amend them as they want that document that I just tried to show you 2018 international energy conservation code has been recently adopted at the state level and now it's at the county levels and that is well the energy code is the one that I'm proposing to amend to and save immense amounts of energy and let me go back and ask why are we so concerned about saving energy at the beginning we cited we cited the reduction in CO2 Hawaii still gets most of its electricity from oil I think it's Libya and Russia that we get most of our oil from and that of course emits a CO2 which adds a global warming which helps to cause all of these disasters we're seeing worldwide and we are converting to as you're probably reading the papers solar energy and wind energy nice clean renewable energy that's great on the one hand on the other hand what we want to do is achieve efficiency in our equipment and and the LED lamps are the primary source of efficiency and again you have all these other health benefits from from the LED so that that's why we're we're pushing so hard if any of you want to get involved in any of the code making process it's very fascinating sometimes contentious processing certainly just just contact me and I will get you involved but with a little more background Hawaii was the first state in the nation to say we're going to have 100 percent clean electrical energy by 2045 we did that about five years ago it was absolutely radical at that time and since then all other progressive states in the union have emulated Hawaii Hawaii led the way what I'm attempting to do with this amendment is have Hawaii lead the way lead the nation in energy efficiency because as soon as we adopted at the Hawaii level I will contact people I know nationwide and say look what Hawaii did you might want to take a look at this and I am pretty darn sure they will because it just makes so much sense so we we can be proud of ourselves in that sense and another reason why Hawaii is leading the way is just looking at renewable energy sources guess which state in the nation has the best solar regime that means the greatest incidents of sunshine and you can say well Arizona New Mexico Southern California they probably they look at how hot it is there or Las Vegas look at how hot it is there in the summer I can say yes but they have winters it gets cold there in the winters meaning the sun is way well down in the sky whereas Hawaii has a good strong winter sunshine so that we produce more solar energy per capita than anyone else in the nation and we are going absolutely gangbusters in that you and I grew up with solar water heating which is it works absolutely perfectly in Hawaii because you store up all this hot water during the day and then people come home from work from school and all water starts being used hot water and guess what there's a battery of hot water sitting in 80 gallon tanks and it gets used and just a final note on solar energy also we have now the photovoltaics many of you probably have those on your roofs and we have now gone radically strongly over towards photovoltaics to make the electricity plus energy storage in these big batteries why because we're making that solar energy in the middle of the day when most of us are off to offices for schools and we really need the energy between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. guess what a lot of that energy gets stored in these big batteries and then we take it back in the evening and just gotta go back finally this is going to be happening with electric vehicles not only we're going to have lots of them but we can the electric vehicle owners can enter into agreement with the utilities and use those batteries as reserve storage when the utility needs it so I believe our time is up and let me just summarize again LED's are the wave of the future and by adopting this new building energy code to specify high efficacy LED's white is leading the nation and certainly doing its part to reduce co2 emissions and eventually turn the clock back to world equilibrium this is Howard Wigg think take away cold green see you in two weeks thank you very much