Saving Energy for the New Year

The giant 10,000 LED ball officially dropped in Times Square to usher in 2008, and I'm sure there was no lack of sound bites (or wonderment) on how amazing the ball looked.

For probably an entire minute (and via multiple replays on various channels all over the world), everyone's eyes were locked onto what will become the future of lighting. And was there an any more spectacular sight at that moment as we all counted down to midnight and made our new years resolution, while thinking to ourselves "This year will be the best one yet!"

I want to be the first one to proclaim that 2008 will be "The Year of the LED". From an early present from the U.S. government to sign the energy bill that will ban incandescents, to new innovations in LED light efficiency, we are slowly making the changes we need to extract ourselves from the dependency of energy. But that change will happen much faster if we can educate people on things that they can do to help themselves as well. The question that really needs to be answered is "What's in it for me?"I personally want to save the watts that I use on lighting to power my new Intel Core2Duo desktop and my Wii that I got for Christmas! That's a far cry from the Atari 2600 and Speak & Spell that was all the rage over two decades ago. I wonder how much energy those consoles used up...