LED Lighting's Potential for Energy Savings and Environmental Benefits is Being Wasted

Despite the significant energy efficiency and versatility of Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), their potential to save energy and improve the environment is being squandered due to excessive and poorly designed lighting practices. In locations like London's Trafalgar Square, modern LED fixtures, often housed in traditional designs, contribute to light pollution and glare, washing out older lighting systems. This over-illumination, driven by a primal fear of darkness and a misconception that more light equals more safety, creates shadows and hinders vision, even for modern CCTV cameras. The excessive artificial light at night disrupts human and animal circadian rhythms, impeding melatonin production and increasing the risk of serious health issues such as obesity, certain cancers, and type 2 diabetes, particularly due to the blue light emitted by LEDs. While LEDs offer substantial energy savings, often exceeding 50 percent compared to incandescent bulbs, and have long lifespans reducing maintenance costs, their advanced capabilities for controlled, tunable, and color-specific illumination are largely underutilized. Projects like the Illuminated River in London, while showcasing artistic LED applications, have failed to address existing problematic lighting on riverbanks. The true promise of LEDs lies in their digital controllability, allowing for dynamic adjustments in brightness and color based on time, season, or specific needs, such as dimming lights during low-traffic hours or turning them off during bird migrations to prevent fatal collisions. However, most public LED installations have not been integrated into comprehensive plans to manage and reduce nighttime illumination, thus failing to realize their full environmental and societal benefits.