I was at a Radiohead concert the other day and I was amazed at the wall of lighting the band created to go with their special kind of sound.

I went on to the band's site and I got an explanation of how the LED lighting system for the current tour came about.

The four-day Rock Werchter festival in Belgium promotes itself as a green event and the band's explanation coincided with its aims.

Radiohead's decision to use LED lighting instead of traditional stage lighting itself foreshadows a coming change in the way we illuminate our world. Current office and home lighting is extremely inefficient as I explain below. But first back to the Radiohead gig.

The band's tour production manager, Richard Young, says in a post on the band's site that the last major Radiohead tour in 2003 used a lighting system that required an electricity supply of 600amps 3phase (1,800A).

The switch to LED for the band's massive light and video show meant that Radiohead currently uses 140A 3phase (420A) in total. That is less than one-third of the energy used in 2003.

Young believes the current Radiohead tour is the first exclusively LED tour lighting system. The decision to use LED started with a conversation about generators at festivals and green field sites.

Traditional stage lighting uses dimmers to turn things on and off.

When full on lighting is not needed, which is most of the time, the generators are idling inefficiently, using fuel and producing carbon emissions.

The band's lighting and visuals designer then suggested Radiohead should exclusively use LED. Light-emitting diode (LED) lighting uses a combination of red, green and blue emitters to make colours.

When all three emitters are on, the lighting is white. To create different colours and effects, the percentage of the power is decreased. By comparison, traditional lighting uses a subtractive method, meaning that filters must be placed in front of a white source to remove the unwanted colour, as Young explains.

For example, to produce red, one must use 100 per cent of the power for a third of the light output.

The use of LED therefore cut down the power needed, resulting in a greener show. The band used lighting from iPix (www.i-pix.uk.com) to achieve what I agree is a stunning effect.

But how will this translate into better energy use for us mere mortals? The standard incandescent or filament light bulbs we use for white light achieve only five per cent efficiency. That is, only five per cent is transformed into light, the rest is radiated as waste heat.

Meanwhile, compact fluorescent light bulbs achieve only about 15 per cent efficiency. The OLLA project represents one group of researchers who are working on developing a special kind of LED, white organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) could cut energy use and costs in the future.

The researchers believe that OLEDs could one day emit all the energy consumed as visible light, without a compromise in overall white light quality.

Currently, they have managed to achieve the same efficiency for white light OLEDs as for fluorescent bulbs.

Check out the future of lighting at www.olla-project.org Go into the download section to see photographs of some of the lighting the researchers have created using OLEDs.

For example they have created decorative OLED lighting tiles for ceilings and walls.The technology could also be used to create a homogeneously lit ceiling, or a window that provides natural light during daytime and artificial light at night, the researchers believe.

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