The Future of Lighting Technology (Draft)

From the outdoor Greek theatres to candlelit plays to the modern day tungsten lights. Lighting has come a long way since the start of theatre. Even today, when the lighting department has advanced technology available to them, theatre lighting is continuously making technological advancements with LEDs being used more often as they are more energy efficient than the conventional generic lights making them more environmentally friendly; most of the energy that tungsten lights use gets wasted as heat causing theatres to leave a massive carbon footprint. This is why the European Commission is passing a new legislation whereas theatres are going to be forced to change their tungsten lamps with LED ones.

This is great for the environment but not so good for productions as there is yet to be a suitable LED replacement for the tungsten lamps. It is easy for individuals to get rid of their incandescent lamps and replace them with LED lamps but for theatres, it is more complicated than that as replacement screw lamps for theatrical fixtures are non-existent. This allows for only one option, that is to change the entire light which is costly because LED lights are expensive. Due to the fact that conventional theatre lights are really reliable and have the ability of having a lifespan of a number of decades, changing the tungsten lights with LED ones is also wasteful. Doing this would also mean that you have to change all of the control systems because LED units have more complicated electronics within them that necessitate a new structure to use.

To add to the complication, the way the human eye is made up causes it to struggle to perceive the boundaries of the colour spectrum. In order to counter this, the colours that are the most vivid have to be put at a higher intensity to allow the audience to see them clearly. This entails more power to be drawn by the light which defeats the point of the LED fixture being more energy efficient.

A viable solution to get around this is to fit the luminaire with gels. The problem with this though, is that it renders the light inefficient because you are blocking out the light that you do not wish to have causing some of the energy to be wasted. Needless to say, this takes the European Commission’s efficiency principle and throws it out the window. To make a light as efficient as possible, you only want to produce the light that you want to have.

Consequently, the European Commission means well but it is not going about the matter with the best approach. With climate change being a serious issue, we do need to think about reducing the carbon footprint of theatre lighting and increasing the energy efficiency is a good way of doing that but as it stands we cannot replace the conventional tungsten lights with LEDs whilst maintaining the same standard of lighting shows because despite the fact that LEDs have the useful feature of colour mixing with an in-built colour palette, lighting designers continue to favour the tungsten halogen lamps because of the natural and warm light that they produce as supposed to the cold light that LEDs emit.

In conclusion, theatres will eventually replace their lighting rigs with LEDs which will decrease the carbon footprint of theatres but not before the required technology has been developed allowing LEDs to do what the tungsten halogen lamps currently do in order to make them a suitable replacement. The cost of LEDs also needs to drastically decrease because presently, substituting all of the tungsten lights will take a massive bite out of the budget of the theatres that can actually afford to do such a thing; let alone the smaller ones that can’t.