What if you owned big shiny dump trucks to haul 100 tons of sand, but they leaked? And by the time the driver got to his destination, only 3.5 tons of sand were left? That may sound ridiculous, but you witness it every day. Except it’s not sand we’re talking about. It’s electricity. Every time you turn on an incandescent lamp you’re seeing about 3.5 percent of the energy you’re paying for to power it up. The other 96.5 percent is lost power. You can’t see that lost power, but you can feel it, in the form of heat…As lighting designers, we can’t plug all the energy leaks, but in many instances we can make them smaller.
— Richard Cadena, from Focus on Fundamentals, PLSN, May 2008.
