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It should be provable that thermodynamics guarantees that it will be more power-efficient to generate the light directly with electricity instead of using electricity to cool the room, then exploiting a thermal gradient with even a lossless Peltier element.


True, and it is. However, if you are going to be using that energy to cool the room anyway, why not try to reclaim that 'spent' energy?


If you wish to have

1) a cool room at temperature T

2) enough light, L, to see by

3) a happy human at temperature H

Assuming that T,H, and L are fixed, you're going to use more energy with a less-efficient process. So, you'll 'spend' more energy to get there.

If you're trying to run the process at fixed energy, you're going to wind up accepting a slightly higher T. If that's the case, you'd be able to use even less energy by powering the LED directly and moving the setpoint for T up to that same temperature.


I think what you are forgetting is that in doing so, you would be heating the room up again.

So to keep the temperature where you want it, you'd need to cool the room even more.


Ahh, you are right.




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