Visitors to this year’s prestigious Basel Art Fair have been intrigued and astonished by a chandelier designed by Dominic Harris, a British lighting artist. A group of 19 transparent suspended globes glow from within, as if by magic, each globe appearing to cradle a tiny crescent moon. Depending on the angle from which the chandelier is viewed, the light seems either to bloom from the top of each globe, or pool at the base.
The globes are illuminated by “OLEDs” (organic light-emitting diodes), the latest in eco-lighting technology, providing light with minuscule amounts of power. Each globe requires less than two watts of electricity, the entire chandelier using under 30 watts. As a comparison with conventional lighting, OLEDs produce 45 lumens (a measurement of brightness) per watt of electricity compared with 10 lumens per watt for tungsten bulbs. The Moon chandelier, shown publicly for the first time at Basel, represents a breakthrough for OLED technology, which has been exciting environmentally concerned scientists, designers and architects for several years but has, until recently, resisted widespread applications for domestic lighting.
“OLEDs are fascinating from an artistic point of view because of their creative potential,” says Dominic, who trained in architecture at University College London before moving into more experimental materials and technologies. Whereas in tungsten lighting electricity passes through a wire and in fluorescent lighting the current passes through a gas, in OLEDs electricity is passed through one or more extremely thin layers of organic semiconductor material sandwiched between microscopically thin layers of glass. Light can appear in layers, sheets and in strange curved shapes, not from a single point. Dominic’s chandelier, which focuses the OLEDs’ light through acrylic spheres, has enabled him to achieve a much brighter light than the normally flat use of OLEDs.
The technology is still expensive. Dominic’s £20,000 chandelier is priced as a work of art rather than a domestic electric appliance. Until recently, it was not even possible to find a simple plug-in OLED lamp, for any price. But now lighting manufacturers are beginning to make OLED lamp stands with ordinary plug adaptors for domestic use – although they are still very expensive.
One such “luminaire” is the floor-mounted “O’Leaf”, sculpted into a beautiful plant-like structure, light appearing to glow from the leaf surfaces and currently for sale at £1,830 (atrium.ltd.uk). It shares the chandelier’s energy efficiency, using just under 10 watts.
“The next step is a much lower cost version of OLED lighting, but it is still a relatively new technology,” says Dominic. “I would say we are with OLEDs about where we were 10 years ago with ordinary LED lights, when they were pretty dim and expensive, whereas today they produce much brighter, warmer and more instantaneous light than fluorescents.”
Like-for-like LED-tungsten replacement bulbs have recently dropped in price and a 60-watt equivalent LED bulb, using only five watts of electricity now costs around £11, far cheaper than the £30 they cost as little as two years ago (see ledhut.co.uk/led-bulbs/b22-led-bulbs.html).
This sounds the welcome death knell for compact fluorescents (cfls), the ugly bulbs that everyone hates, being both harsh and dim.
Dietmar Thomas of Philips’s OLED research plant in Aachen, Germany, says that by as early as 2015 reasonably priced OLED lamps for domestic use will be available. “Currently OLEDs cost around €6,000-€7,000 [£5,080-£5,930] per square metre. Advances in manufacturing techniques mean that by this time next year they will cost around €1,000 [£850] per square metre. The implications for energy use are enormous,” he says. “If you think that 20 per cent of all electricity generated in the world goes to power lighting, and we have the technology to reduce lighting’s power demands by up to 90 per cent, then that’s pretty revolutionary.”
Back in 2007, in her groundbreaking report “Home Truths” on homes and climate change, Dr Brenda Boardman of the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, suggested OLEDs were a future way to reduce carbon emissions from homes by 80 per cent. Back then, her vision of sheets of light emerging from walls seemed almost science fiction. Today, we are almost there.
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