Light up the world

Tonight I attended a talk at The Commonwealth Club by the man who founded the Light Up the World foundation. This organization aims to bring low cost, low power and low tech electric lighting solutions to the 1.7 billion people who are currently without any electric lighting. Yes, that's 1.7 billion. Guess what kind of lighting they use now instead of electric lighting? Mostly kerosine lamps which range from at beast dim but reasonably safe, to dim but very dangerous with a significant risk of fire, expensive and certainly enivironmentally unsound.

Frankly I can say I was amazed at what this organization has achived in developing a solution that will give up to 20 years of lighting for a home with only $40 up front cost consuming just 1 to 4 W of power. The lower power high efficiency of solid state LED lights has allowed use of rechargeable battery solutions combined with home grown pedal, solar, wind and water recharging technologies. The only on going cost is a few bucks every few years or so to replace the batteries. The goal of LUTW is $20 for twenty years of lighting with no environmental impact. Isn't that great? There's me taking 400W or so of lighting for granted, and here's an organization that is giving homes light for four hours or more a night at only 1 to 4W per home. Frankly I say its a wonderful use of technology and one I'm going to work on getting involved with.

So it leads you to wonder what it would take to give lighting to all 1.7 billion people who don't have lighting and what the impact on the world would be. Even with their current cost structures for a relatively small effort its easy to see that just a few tens of billions would bring reliable, cheap, environmentally sound lighting to almost 1/3 of the worlds population. Now how much was it that George Bush's war against Saddam is costing the USA? Strangely the costs are almost exactly equivalent.

Its clear that if America really wanted to do something truely worthy of a great nation it should put away those $1M a shot depleated uranium filled cruise missiles and light one up for the poor, unlit masses. They might actually thank us for it...