LED Lights

Making Green, Sustainable Designs Available

It’s time for products like LED lights to go mainstream.

Green energy is gaining power. The current global economic climate has demanded a change. Change will soon be coming to America through new energy sources, new products, new buildings and new ways of thinking. Emerging technologies such as LED lights lead the stimulus for good, green design. LED lights aren’t just for cell phones anymore. More and more cities buy LED lights to help light their skylines with fresh green light.  LED lights are finding their way into homes across American along with other changes.

One goal of the energy stimulus is to ensure that money spent goes to creative, sustainable buildings and technologies, like LED lights, that will stand the test of time and will still be used by our children and our grandchildren. After all, they are the ones who are going to be paying for these debt-financed projects.

Government sponsorship of great architecture and design has a proud tradition in the United States, starting with Thomas Jefferson, himself an architect and the designer of Monticello, the University of Virginia and the Virginia Capitol. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal gives us an instructive model for our challenge today.

President Obama’s stimulus package has already been compared to the New Deal as a jobs creation program. As part of FDR’s response to the Great Depression, numerous public-works projects were funded by the federal government. Those projects put people back to work, but they also created civic masterworks that still stand, like the Golden Gate Bridge and Camp David.

Perhaps the greatest design opportunity the economic stimulus can give us is for green and sustainable design to become an automatic and essential part of the new economy. Sustainable architecture of new buildings and design of green products, like LED lights, will no longer be an added extra; these designs will be the norm.  More people will be given the opportunity to buy LED lights and other green products like energy efficient automobiles as the become part of the popular marketplace.

In the same way that a bailout for the auto industry presents the prospect of reorienting the design of automobiles in a sustainable direction, so the economic stimulus package offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reorient our architectural focus toward sustainable design. There are few better ways to do that than to put federal contracting dollars behind sustainable design.