The winning bulb.
Yesterday, the DOE announced that Philips Lighting North America won the first award under the Department's Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L Prize) competition. DOE's L Prize challenged the lighting industry to develop high-performance, energy-saving replacements for conventional light bulbs.

Philips Lighting North America is the first winner in the 60-watt replacement bulb category, one of the most widely used lighting types. Philips developed a highly efficient LED product to meet the rigorous requirements of the L Prize competition – ensuring that performance, quality, lifetime, cost, and availability meet expectations for widespread adoption and mass manufacturing.

The winning Philips product excelled through short-term and long-term performance testing carried out by independent laboratories and field assessments conducted with utilities and other partners. The product also performed exceedingly well through a series of stress tests, in which the product was subjected to extreme conditions such as high and low temperatures, humidity, vibration, high and low voltage, and various electrical waveform distortions. The bulb could arrive in stores as soon as early 2012.

Launched in 2008, DOE's first L Prize category targets the 60-watt bulb because it is one of the most widely used types of light bulbs by consumers, representing roughly half of the domestic incandescent light bulb market. Every year it is estimated that more than 425 million 60-watt incandescent light bulbs are sold in the United States alone. The L Prize challenge sets the goal for the winning product's energy performance extremely high. The energy-saving replacement for 60-watt conventional bulbs must use less than 10 watts of power, providing an energy savings of 83 percent. If every 60-watt incandescent bulb in the U.S. was replaced with the 10-watt L Prize winner, the nation would save about 35 terawatt-hours of electricity or $3.9 billion in one year and avoid 20 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

(L Prize)