Dave Irvine-Halliday is a man who, given half a chance, likes to run up mountains. He used to climb them, too, but a fractured leg in an ice fall and two broken neck vertebrae in an avalanche effectively put a stop to his career as a serious mountaineer. Despite these mishaps, Dave retains his love of mountains; for him, it's a spiritual thing. Not surprising then, that in 1997, when fate presented him with the opportunity to hike the Annapurna Circuit, a 185-mile Himalayan trail that winds around some of the most magnificent mountain scenery in the world, Dave grabbed it with both hands.
A Scottish-born professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary in Canada, Dave had been on sabbatical in Nepal doing a project sponsored by the World Bank. For three and a half weeks he had been working with his counterparts at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, helping them set up an electrical engineering degree course. It occurred to Irvine-Halliday that while he was there, he could give a one-day course on his specialty, fiber optics. His suggestion was enthusiastically received. It would mean staying a little longer, but he had an open ticket, so there would be no problem. Or so he thought; changing flights from Nepal back to Canada turned out to be much more complicated than he had imagined. Dave found himself with some unanticipated extra time in the kingdom. “I thought, OK,” he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully at the recollection, “now I can have a look at Nepal!”
Having considered, and rejected, a trip to see Mount Everest, Dave opted instead for the Annapurna Circuit. This was attractive because, being a circuit, it would mean not having to retrace his steps. He hired a local, Babu Ram Rimal, to act as his guide and porter, and off they went. One afternoon, with the light beginning to fade, the two arrived at a village. Rimal invited Dave to have a cup of tea at a house belonging to two of his relatives. Inside the modest mud-and-stone dwelling, it was very dark. Since the power grid does not extend to this remote part of Nepal, there was no electric light. Dave had always prided himself on the acuity of his night vision. Even on the darkest nights he could usually see enough not to fall over things. Here, however, as he sipped his tea and chatted away, with Rimal acting as interpreter, he was simply not able see his hosts. Except for every now and then, when the wood fire they were using to boil water would flare up, and he would get a flash of light. It was only later, when taking their leave outside, that Irvine-Halliday was able to discern what the elderly couple looked like.
A few days later, in another village near the end of the trail, Dave had a second epiphany. He heard some children singing. Setting off to look for the source of the sound, he came across a school. Although it was daytime, there were no kids around. He peered through a tiny window. Inside, the classroom was very dark. How could the kids see to read? he wondered. Then immediately afterward, for some reason, another thought crossed his mind: I'm a photonics engineer—is there anything I can do to help? It was, as he would often remark to his wife, Jenny, the kind of thought that, once you've had it, you can never forget. During the remaining couple of days of the trek, and on the flight home, Irvine-Halliday pondered what he could do to help the poor benighted people of Nepal.
Back in Calgary, over the next couple of years, at nights and on weekends, Dave gnawed away at the problem. Understanding from the outset that the light source would have to be low power, he tried to produce white light using LEDs. As a specialist in fiber optics, he knew a great deal about semiconductor light sources. But his expertise was with the infrared LEDs used in communications, it did not extend to the visible, high-brightness type of devices. At first Dave experimented by combining red-green-blue indicator-type diodes. The results were pathetic: in the darkest room, even allowing half an hour for your eyes to become accustomed to the dark, you could hardly see the faint circle of light the LEDs emitted, never mind read by it.
Then, one day, Dave happened to be messing about doing Web searches on his computer. For what he swears must have been the umpteenth time, he typed in the words “white LED.” Seemingly from out of nowhere, up popped the site of a Japanese company called Nichia, on which there was a picture of a white light emitting diode. Excited by this discovery, Irvine-Halliday immediately reached for the phone and called the company's US office. “If your white LEDs are half as good as you're claiming,” he told them, “they could be the answer for this project I'm working on for the developing world.” Within days, he received a package of samples.
Pausing only to grab a technician named John Shelley, Dave dashed off downstairs to his lab. There, they hooked up one of the diodes to a power supply, placing directly underneath it on the bench a sheet of typed paper. Dave turned out the lights and the pair waited in the pitch darkness for what seemed an eternity for their eyes to get accustomed to the dark. Then he flicked the switch. A soft white glow lit up the entire paper. “Good God, John,” Irvine-Halliday gasped, “a child could read by the light of a single diode!” It was a bona fide eureka moment. The white LED consumed less than one-tenth of a watt. “I knew then that I was onto something.” Indeed he was. What he was onto was something that promises to have profound implications for the one-third of humanity—two-billion-plus people—that live their lives off the electric grid.
For such people, nightfall means darkness. To light their homes, villagers in remote parts of the world like Nepal typically use kerosene. To obtain it, they walk for hours, sometimes days, to the depot and back, lugging heavy jerrycans. Recurring expenditure on kerosene eats up a significant fraction of the family budget. But as a light source, a kerosene bottle lamp leaves a lot to be desired. The light from the lamps’ wick is so poor that children can only see their schoolbooks if they are almost on top of the flame, directly inhaling the toxic smoke, which is a nasty mixture of carbon monoxide and carcinogens. Smoke from kerosene causes respiratory diseases, eye infections, and lung and throat cancer. It is especially bad for children with asthma.
In addition, kerosene bottle lamps are easily upset. The first time Jenny Irvine-Halliday saw one she thought that it looked like a Molotov cocktail, an accident waiting to happen. Bottle lamps are often blown over by the wind or knocked over by small animals. The fires that result cause terrible burns. Once engulfed in flames, clothing soaked in kerosene can take ten to fifteen minutes to extinguish. The victims are mainly women and children. A mother trying to save her child often gets burned as well. Victims typically receive burns to large parts of their bodies. Approximately 40 percent of burns occurring in Sri Lanka, for example, are caused by the accidental breakage of kerosene bottle lamps. According to a World Health Organization report, burns account for a third of hospital admissions worldwide. They cause 3.5 million deaths annually.
In May 1999 Dave returned to Nepal together with Jenny and some prototype light fixtures that he had built using white LEDs that he had bought from Nichia. Other components, such as switches and batteries, he had also had to buy with his own money. The lights were mostly powered by a pedal-driven generator he designed. The trip was paid for with Jenny's credit card, on the understanding that she got to go with him. They spent three months bouncing around from village to village. Initially, Dave was not sure what the reaction would be. “You'd better prepare yourself for the possibility that people might not like this,” he warned Jenny. In fact, the response was overwhelmingly positive. No matter how much Irvine-Halliday tried to talk his LED lights down, everywhere they went, people thought that the lamps were the best thing. Especially since they were so rugged and long-lasting.
One night was particularly memorable. “We were staying in what I jokingly call a minus-seven star hotel. It was this wee guesthouse in a village high up in the mountains. At night, lying on the floor in your sleeping bag, there were these creatures running over you. I had no idea what they were and I didn't want to know. The owner had this pressurized kerosene lantern. It roared like hell, you had almost to shout to make yourself heard above the noise, but it gave a lot of light, far more than the little thing that I had made. I asked him, Can I set up my light? It was like a strip light with eight or so white LEDs, connected to a fully charged battery. I strung it up over a rafter with a piece of string so that it hung just above the table where we were sitting, switched it on, and asked the owner to switch his lamp off. Of course the difference in light was significant. My LED light was a lot less bright, but as we got used to it, the guy realized that there was no smoke, no smell, and no noise. It was quiet. You could actually see quite well, we could all see ourselves, and people were saying, This is great. So at the end of the night, the guy said, Could you please leave this light here? It's much better than what we've got, and kerosene is so expensive.”
During this trip, Irvine-Halliday made another significant discovery. “People were using these three D-cell flashlights, but typically the only light their bulbs put out was a weak incandescent glow. Although they couldn't see anything with them, at night they'd walk down these trails with precipitous drops on either side. They have to replace the batteries every couple of weeks, and the bulbs they buy are of such poor quality that they burn out all the time. So I'm looking at these flashlights, and I thought: We can do better than this. I went back to Kathmandu, bought a flashlight, broke it apart, and replaced the bulb with four LEDs, so it was like a wee searchlight. I took it back to the villages, I'd bang it on the table, and the lens would fall out, but the light never went out. I'd hand the flashlight to people, then just as they were about to take it, I'd drop it, and they'd go, Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'd say, That's OK, see—it still works! And they'd want to borrow it to go round the village with, to show it off. Well, the number of times that flashlight disappeared! In the morning, I would say to the headman of the village, I'm not leaving till I've got my flashlight back, and he'd go out and find whoever who had it.
“That's where I came up with the term ‘useful light.’ What I mean by that is, light that can be used fruitfully by someone in the developing world. Our tests indicate that for a flashlight with an incandescent bulb and three new alkaline batteries, after thirty hours, it's pathetic, but it still glows so we count it; after fifty hours, it's dead. Replace the bulb with three LEDs and at five hundred hours you still have a significant amount of light. At a thousand hours, you can still actually read by it. It doesn't light up a whole page, it just lights up a bit. A thousand hours, at three hours a night, is a year. So one set of batteries could actually last you a year, if you really stretch it out. And that just blows you away.”
With a single 1-watt LED lamp, it would be possible to light up the most important part of a home in the developing world. Such a lamp would illuminate an area equivalent to a table large enough for four children to sit around and read and write comfortably. Dave returned to Calgary with no further doubts about what he had to do. It took a while, but what had begun in his mind as vague ideas gradually took shape as a well-defined vision. In 1999 he coined a name for his initiative. The title he chose said it all: Light Up the World.1
Almost from day one, Dave realized that if the developing world was going to be lit up, if the initiative was going to go beyond what some people called “backpack philanthropy,” then there was no way he could do it working on his own. People in the developing world would have to make it happen for themselves. The technology was in some ways the easy part; in addition, you also needed to have various forms of logistical support in place. There would have to be some “social entrepreneurship,” the initiative would be market driven. Dave's son Gregor convinced him that people only truly appreciate something when they pay for it themselves. “The great thing is, there's lots of money to be made from these lights—you don't just give them away.”
Dave himself would not make any money. His policy is not to patent any of the technology that he and his co-workers have developed “because, generally speaking, patents keep improvements away from poor people.” He decided that wherever it was possible the lights would be produced, assembled, marketed, and sold by local enterprises in the country they were used. In Nepal in 2000, for example, with the help of a local entrepreneur called Muni Raj Upadhyaya, who had experience with solar panels, Dave set up PicoPower, a model company located on the outskirts of Kathmandu. In addition to doing assembly work, PicoPower has also exceeded expectations by innovating its own products. “They're on the ground, they do the work, they know what the local people need,” said Ken Robertson, Light Up the World's first full-time employee, who joined the fledgling organization in 2001.
Light Up the World's main role is to design white LED lighting systems and to source components—diodes, solar panels, and batteries—testing them to make sure they operate as advertised, then shipping them to where they are needed. Attempting to ensure that the foundation does not pay too much for its parts, Dave came up with the concept of “social pricing.” “I told our suppliers, What we want is an agreement where we can buy parts from you at the million-unit price. We become a customer and, regardless of the ups and downs of the market, we can come to you and buy ten thousand or however many LEDs and get them at the million-unit price. Because we're a humanitarian organization, we're not going to be selling them on to somebody who's trying to make a profit.”
Remarkably enough, most of his suppliers, no doubt swayed by Irvine-Halliday's formidable powers of persuasion and his record of success in the field, have signed up for the idea. They include LumiLEDs, Kyocera, TIM Industries (a Hong Kong battery maker), and Premier Solar (a manufacturer of solar panels based in Hyderabad, India). The effect of social pricing has been dramatic. “Our batteries went from $20 each down to $4.50,” he exults. “I mean, it just turns the economics of the ‘light-in-a-box’ package as we call it on its head. It makes it so much more affordable for those at the base of the pyramid.”
A typical Light Up the World system consists of two or three 1-watt lamps, a 5-watt solar panel, a 12-volt maintenance-free battery, electrical wiring, and some switches. The installed cost of the system averages around one hundred dollars, the hardware accounting for around sixty-five dollars, with shipping, training, customs duties, social impact studies, and other expenses making up the rest. That is without any economies of scale, particularly of the lamps, which include LEDs, lens, circuit board, housing, and the solar panel, the single most expensive part of the package. Considerable scope thus remains for further reductions in price.
But one hundred dollars represents a significant expense for people who only earn a few hundred dollars a year. How can poor people afford LED lighting systems? “With micro-credit,” Irvine-Halliday explained. That is, small loans extended to very poor people that are typically used to generate extra income.
There was more to having a reliable source of light than met the eye, though. “What it took this thick skull a year or two to really appreciate was that, this is a double whammy. Once these folk have paid for their LED lighting, they've got something that's much healthier, much safer. It gives out better light, lasts much longer, it's portable, it's rugged, all these kinds of things. So their kids can see to do their homework, which raises the levels of literacy and education, and women can run little cottage industries, which leads to economic and social progress. But wait a minute: What are they going to do with the sixty bucks they used to spend on kerosene? Because every year thereafter, they've got this extra cash. I'm not a sociologist, but I started asking people, What do you think the socioeconomic ramifications of this are? And the answer is, they're immense.
“With the right people in the right place at the right time, you can get exponentials on exponentials in terms of growth. In twenty years, maybe even ten, the developing world could light itself up. Because the prices are coming down and we've got the economic model to get it there. But, having said that, we need help, and we need a hell of a lot of it.” In mid-2006, Light Up the World had just two full-time employees (not including the founder, whose only income is his professor's salary) plus two part-timers, and perhaps half a dozen volunteers. Dave Green of Carmanah was a proud supporter of the foundation. “He contacted me, said he really loved what we were doing, and asked if there was any way he could help.” The upshot was that Carmanah is paying for a grad student to assist Light Up the World in its work.
In 2005 Dave was invited down to the University of California at Santa Barbara to give a talk. His host, the Nobel laureate Walter Kohn, asked him if he knew where Shuji Nakamura worked. “I think he's in the States somewhere,” Dave replied uncertainly. Kohn smiled and said, “Would you and Jenny like to have lunch with him?” Forty-five minutes later, at the UC Santa Barbara faculty club, an astounded Irvine-Halliday found himself being introduced to Shuji. “So, Light Up the World—what is that?” Nakamura wanted to know. Dave embarked on an explanation. Jenny was sitting opposite Shuji. As she told Dave afterward, she noted the expression on Nakamura's face gradually changing, from indifference to passionate interest in what Dave was telling him. Shuji was deeply impressed to have met someone who was actually carrying out his dream, of bringing LED light to the people of the world. For his part, Dave was thrilled to have met the man without whom there would have been no Light Up the World. Before long, the two had struck up a mutual appreciation society. They parted with Nakamura promising to help Irvine-Halliday in any way he could.2
The University of Calgary is located on the northwestern edge of the city, which some call “the Houston of the North” because it is the hub of Canada's oil industry. From the campus, you can see the snowcapped Canadian Rockies, about an hour's drive to the west. I already knew Dave Irvine-Halliday was a fellow Scot. Where I grew up, a double-barreled name was a sure sign of an upper-class pedigree, so I was not quite sure what to expect. On arriving in Calgary I called Dave from my hotel to fix a time for our meeting. I was surprised and delighted to hear a working-class accent that I instantly recognized. Irvine-Halliday was born in 1942 in Perth, but raised in the Scottish east coast port of Dundee, literally just down the road from my own birthplace. His father, Jim, was a machinist; his mother, Frances, a mill worker. The hyphenated name comes from the fact that, when Dave and Jenny got married, instead of her changing her name to his, they both adopted each other's surnames, an egalitarian practice much more common now than it was then. A former midwife, Jenny remains Dave's imperturbable constant companion, always on hand to bring him back to earth when his flights of fancy get too wild.
In person, his attire—or rather, the lack of it—suggests that Dave has a metabolism that burns faster than that of ordinary mortals. On a chilly morning in early April he wears a short-sleeved polo shirt, short pants—revealing heavily scarred knees—and sandals with no socks. He sports this outfit year-round, even during the winter rigors of minus-35-degree Alberta. This human dynamo's standard mode of locomotion is to run everywhere. He is a compact, wiry man with a full beard and a brush-cut head of salt-and-pepper hair. His manner is warm and friendly. He has a ready laugh and a roundabout manner of speaking, sprinkling his conversation with amusing anecdotes told at his own expense.
Dave is above all a humble person who has stumbled on a grand challenge that he is pursuing, passionately, to the best of his not inconsiderable ability. As befits someone who is thoroughly enjoying his life, “living his dream,” as he puts it, an inner happiness seems to shine from within him. Which is not to say that everything always goes smoothly for Dave. His dual schedule as professor and founder is punishing, and he is perhaps not the best organized of men. He has a tendency to disconcert his staff on occasion by disappearing off into the developing world, where he remains incommunicado for weeks at a time.
To drum up funding for Light Up the World, Irvine-Halliday has given hundreds of talks at schools, universities, conferences, and organizations like Rotary Clubs. Initially, donations came in dribs and drabs, twenty-five dollars here, fifty dollars there. As the foundation started to make its presence felt, winning prestigious international awards for its work, checks for ten or twenty thousand dollars started to appear in the mailbox. But the goal is grand and the money never goes far enough.
In 2000 Light Up the World lit up its first four villages in Nepal, around 135 homes in total. The following year, the foundation broadened its activities to include India and the island nation of Sri Lanka, at the opposite end of the subcontinent. There, together with a team of dedicated undergraduate volunteers from a local university, Light Up the World has been working in a national nature reserve known as the Knuckles Range.
“It's a very environmentally sensitive area,” explains Ganesh Doluweera, a Sri Lankan graduate student in Dave's lab who has helped coordinate the project. “There are some villages deep inside the reserve which will never get any sort of electric utility because you're not allowed to put the grid into such a biodiversity hotspot. If you look at what the villagers do for a living, it's mainly farming. Their kids have to walk a few miles every day to go to school. It could be three or four hours’ walk on average, which means the kids have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and they don't get back until four in the afternoon. Within no time it will be dusk, and in order to read or to study, they have to use some sort of artificial light source, mainly kerosene. Although the price of kerosene is subsidized by the government, it still costs a lot, and the price keeps going up—an average person will spend about three dollars a month on kerosene out of a monthly income of thirty dollars. It's a real burden.”
Ganesh and his team of volunteers installed their first LED lighting systems in 2003, in about a hundred houses in two villages. Each house was given two lamps and a battery, with each village receiving two battery-charging stations. Initial results were encouraging. “Especially the women. They keep on saying that the financial saving means a lot to them, because now they can buy more food or clothing, or maybe get something for their kids, even get their houses renovated. Some of these people had never seen a battery or any form of electrical lighting before. But they quickly got used to it. The women have to work in the fields on their crops during the daytime, but because they have lighting at night, they might make mats from reeds. They can work on things like that, which they didn't want to do with kerosene because it's expensive. Now they save the money they used to spend on kerosene, they can do some work and earn more money, so their income has almost doubled. They also like taking the batteries to the communal charging stations to be recharged, because it gives them a chance to meet their friends and have a gossip!”
The Knuckles Range project grew slowly to encompass around six hundred homes in twelve villages. Then, suddenly, an unexpected opportunity to implement solid-state lighting systems on a large scale in Sri Lanka arose, in the shape of the tragic aftermath of the December 26, 2004, tsunami. This natural disaster killed hundreds of thousands, and left hundreds of thousands more homeless. Irvine-Halliday spent the days after the tsunami tirelessly working the phone, calling his most generous donors and close friends, asking them for help. Within a very short time he had raised almost $140,000, enough for two thousand LED lighting systems.
As in Nepal, Dave insisted on using local talent. He recruited a small firm, Crystal Electronics, based in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, as a partner to assemble and test the systems. “All the lamps are being made in Sri Lanka, which represents a huge influx of capital to that society; it's creating local wealth, which is what you want. We're bringing in solar panels and batteries at a social price from India and Hong Kong. Nichia has donated about thirty thousand diodes and we've bought another thirty-five thousand ourselves. Although these systems are going into refugee camps, they're portable, which means that when the refugees go to their new villages, they'll take the systems with them. It'll be just like we'd lit up the village like we do in our normal projects.” At the time of this writing, around fifteen hundred lighting systems had been installed in camps all along the devastated coast, with the other five hundred assembled and ready to be deployed.
In addition to Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka, Light Up the World and its partners have provided light to about fifteen thousand homes worldwide, impacting the lives of more than one hundred thousand people in twenty-six countries. These include Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Ghana, South Africa, and Zambia. To spread the word still further, Dave has worked up graduate and undergraduate courses in renewable energy-based solid-state lighting for students in disciplines ranging from engineering to development studies. Thus far, he has been teaching the courses himself with the help of graduate students like Ganesh. He has also been handing out DVDs containing all the course materials “so that they can be used in schools and universities, and by NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and governments, to help people appreciate what solid-state lighting is truly all about.”
The course does not overemphasize the technology. “You've got to understand Ohm's law, but that's about it,” Dave says. It touches on such topics as sociology (the economic and cultural benefits of solid-state lighting) and carbon credits (earning income for replacing kerosene). “We compare LEDs to traditional forms of lighting—incandescent, fluorescent, and so on—describing the pros and cons of solid-state lighting. We're quite frank about the fact that it's not all positive. There are some negatives, but it's mainly positive, by a long way. As far as I'm concerned, solid-state is the lighting of choice for the third millennium; LEDs will take over. I don't even discuss it anymore. You no longer say if, it's just when.”
1. Light Up the World officially became a foundation in 2002.
2. Nakamura was as good as his word. See postscript on p. 301