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Ririh Ratiwi
13302241069
Student of International Class of Physics Education
Faculty of Natural Science and Mathemathic
Yogyakarta State University
20 March 2015

Lighting Up The World

The article is taken from the March 2015 issue of Physics World

Many people in the world, more than a billion people live without reliable sources of
electricity, so they do not have access to electric lighting. Jon Cartwright talks that the
people are turning to light-emitting diodes (LED) and its bulbs have helped set off in the
developing world to supply this most basic feature of modern life. For about five and a half
billion of us have more opportunies to do something, the daily activites after a hard day's
work, but for the remaining one and a half billion – some 20% of the world's population – the
activites are rather more limited. These are the people in the developing world who do not
have access to on-grid lighting. Beth Taylor, chair of the UK National Committee for the
International Year of, said that if you're not connected to an electricity grid, then at 6 p.m.
when the Sun goes down, either life stops or you're dependent on a smoky, dangerous
kerosene lamp (1). Taylor is one of many individuals who want to improve access to
alternative off-grid lighting. She has been championing the UK effort in Study After Sunset –
an initiative that is intended to bring safe off-grid lighting to school-age children in particular.
The number of affected people for this progam is huge, and she hopes that by the end of 2015
she and her colleagues will have been able to make a difference.

For many years, maybe 20 years, there had been a variety of companies that — with
support from all sorts of developmental organizations — had tried to deliver energy services
to the roughly 1.3 billion people who have no access to modern energy (Christopher Shea at
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LED Lights Are A 'Transformative Technology' In The Developing World). The people rely
on kerosene, wood and candles for their energy services. Soo these companies had tried to
provide solar home systems. The kerosene lamps have some of the disadvantages of kerosene
lamps compared with electric lamps. They are inefficient devices than the electric lamps.
They produce a dim glow, and they rely on an expensive fuel. Besides, the toxic black smoke
they emit is so dangerous. Kerosene lighting also makes hundreds of thousands of deaths
from poisoning of children, the toxic black smoke contributes to indoor air pollution and
respiratory diseases, which kill more than 1.5 million people every year – more than the total
child deaths from HIV/AIDS and malaria combined according to the World Health
Organization. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that every kerosene
lamp generates on average 200 kg of carbon dioxide per year, contributing significantly to
global warming. The children can easily mistake for actual drinks of kerosene lamps because
kerosene itself is often sold in plastic drinks bottles. But the most dangeorous problem is
kerosene's flammability, kerosene lamps could make fires when lanterns are tipped over,
many of them fatal.

Patrick In 2010 the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched the Global Alliance for
Clean Cookstoves aims to reduce deaths from unsafe indoor stoves by partnering companies
with charities, and by jointly talking to governments and investors. Taylor hopes that she can
makes study for alternative light sources to kerosene lamps by the UK effort in Study After
Sunset. There have been many alternatives to kerosene lamps that available for a long time,
but in recent years one technology has emerged that has blinded the competition: light-
emitting diode (LED) lamps by Walsh in 2006 while he was a physics student at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, taking time off with the non-profit organization
Engineers Without Borders USA. It was only in 2009 that, together with fellow University of
Illinois alumni Anish Thakkar and Mayank Sekhsaria, Walsh launched the first "Sun King".
By 2013 he was selling one million Sun Kings a year, 2014, that figure will be nearly
double..

Light relief
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The Sun King is just one of many LED lanterns designed by small companies with the
developing world. The principle work of LED laterns are recharging batteries with solar
power, although there is at least one interesting exception. In 2013 Martin Riddiford and Jim
Reeves in the UK launched GravityLight, an LED lamp that turns gravitational potential
energy into electrical energy. Many companies that manufacture off-grid LED lighting have
now joined forces under the non-profit Global Off-Grid Lighting Association (GOGLA),
which acts as an industry advocate. Koen Peters, the executive director of GOGLA, says that
the products currently have a market penetration of 2–5%. The LED lamps are not just to rid
people of the obvious problems of accidental fire and respiratory disease. The environmental
impacts in the developing world are going to be huge, too, because of kerosene. For every
100,000 solar lanterns sold, it's 10,000 tons of reduced greenhouse gas emissions annually
(Christopher Shea at LED Lights Are A 'Transformative Technology' In The Developing
World). Koen Peters said that once people have light, they aspire to something beyond it, they
might spend some of the saved money on a solar electricity generator to charge their phone,
rather than go to a village where they will spend half a dollar to charge it. Then they might
use the saved money from that to buy a better generator that can charge a radio, or a TV.
LED lighting is the first stepping stone to an electric life, to which everyone aspires.

He said that the challenge for LED lighting is easier than that for clean stoves:
whereas in all cultures good light is associated with safety, some cultures tend to cling to
their traditional cooking habits of lighting fires indoors. People need to be more aware of the
availability of good LED technology, and of the disadvantages of cheaper competitor
products that still beset the marketplace. After all, off-grid lighting is not a purely charitable
venture. It is a business and, as it grows, there may well be benefits for everyone. Peters
believes that off-grid lighting products could find steadily more customers in developed
nations such as the US, which has less reliable electricity grids than much of Europe.
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Source :

Cartwright, Jon. Lighting Up The World. Web. 12 March. 2015.

<http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2015/mar/12/lighting-up-the-world>.

Shea , Christopher. LED Lights Are A 'Transformative Technology' In The Developing World.
Web. 13 October. 2014. < http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2014/10/13/
354845893/ led-lights-are-a-transformative-technology-in-the-developing-world>.