That's what seems to be happening - these leds are in every conceivable place you could put a bulb. An example - the supermarket just installed individual led bulbs on every single shelf in the wine section. Almost every bottle now has an individual light.

More like going from 40w down to 6w, for the same amount of light.

Personally, I find LED bulbs to be far brighter, but we've always used smaller incandescents (like 40-60w for a ceiling light, instead of 100w), so that's what I'm comparing them to.

I'm talking about a tsunami of lights that didn't exist pre-LED. Also, a lot of the bulbs being replaced are CFLs so the savings in wattage aren't nearly as dramatic. Relatively few LEDs are replacing incandescents - that heavy lifting already happened with CFLs for the most part.

Our entire parking lot was replaced with LED's. All of our buildings are getting retrofitted with LED's FROM florescents. The street lights on our street were replaced with LED's. I'm seeing WAY less CFL's these days. LED's "cure" all the problems that CFL's had. I know what you mean about the flood of LED's in retail places. But my interpretation is that it presents the ability to distribute light in a more "controlled" fashion by having alot of small lights, and still having an overall reduction in the power consumption.

They just replaced our street lights too - and gave us twice the number of lights. Security lights - everywhere now where there were none. Our neighborhood is now lit up like a prison yard. The lights themselves are incredibly obnoxious - piercing glaring unshaded.

Count me out on this BS

As someone else points out, these bulbs are on the order of 6W or so. Thus, one would have to put something like 10 times as many bulbs out just to get back to the kinds of watts they are replacing. But they last a crap load longer too which reduces maintenance costs (which I sometimes think was my companies primary focus, getting rid of the full time bulb replacer). I'd bet that the largest savings this country is experiencing is the parking lot and street light usage. But I have no data to back up such a claim.

We'll see how long they actually last - we were told the same thing about CFLs. the light bulb makers aren't going to invent themselves out of business, that's for sure.

CFL's were touted as lasting forever, but it turned out that's only if you turn them on and leave them on. We'll see how LED's play out. Admittedly, LED's have been used alot longer than CFL's had been when they first came out. But these higher wattage ones still need to prove themselves out in real usage. They are higher efficiency because they generate way more light than heat (unlike incandescents) but they still produce some heat, which causes thermal cycling every time they're turned on and off.