Former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins Turns to the Light Side

Bill Watkins might soon have to insert an extra “t” in his last name. The ex-CEO of Seagate is hoping to earn billions in a new venture: reinventing the light bulb.

Watkins today assumed the chief executive position at Bridgelux, a clean-tech company striving to pioneer light-emitting diode (LED) technology in a streamlined package to catalyze widespread adoption of the energy-saving light.

“We think of lights right now as old eight-tracks,” Watkins said in an interview with Wired.com. “Just as people digitized music we’re going to digitize the light.”

Watkins served as CEO of Seagate, one of the world’s largest storage companies, for five years before he was removed from his post in 2009. Often described as famously outspoken, Watkins was once quoted by Fortune as stating Seagate was in the business of helping “people buy more crap — and watch porn,” which landed him in a PR mess prior to his ousting.

What drew Watkins to the light industry? The huge lucrative opportunity presented by energy-saving LEDs during a period of economic and environmental crisis. The global lighting market is estimated to be worth as much as $100 billion. The LED market represents a very small portion, estimated to be worth $1.6 billion by 2012 — a space Watkins hopes to dominate.

“The opportunity is phenomenal right now,” Watkins told Wired.com.

In development since the 1960s, LEDs are semiconductor devices that convert electricity to light. They’re also called solid-state lights because they emit light from a solid object, as opposed to a vacuum or gas tube seen in traditional incandescent or fluorescent light bulbs.

LED technology offers brighter light with lower energy consumption and longer overall life compared to incandescent light sources. The Department of Energy’s goal is to completely replace light bulbs with LEDs over the next 20 years. According to Cree, the current leader in LED technology, LED lighting can eliminate the need to build 133 coal-fired power plants, thereby saving 258 million tons of greenhouse gases, which could equate to powering 12 million American homes a year.

However, general-purpose, residential LEDs are still a relatively small market. We mostly see LEDs used in store signs, computer displays, digital clocks, mobile devices and plenty of other everyday applications. But they have yet to replace the everyday incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs illuminating our homes. General-purpose adoption is stifled by high costs and�fragmentation of providers who produce the components for LED systems, Watkins said.

Watkins’ company, Bridgelux, is employing a vertical-integration strategy, in which the company produces and sells all the components needed for a complete LED system. Other LED lighting providers use a more modular approach, so you need to buy components separately.

Bridgelux on Wednesday is beginning to ship its LED Array products, which include all the parts necessary to make them work — substrate layers, optics, lenses, arrays, chips and modules — so clients won’t have to purchase components separately; they’ll get the full product.

“We take all this stuff and give you the finished product,” Watkins said.

The company demonstrated a sample unit to Wired.com (above) containing each of the different configurations. Different lighting colors including warm white, natural white and cool white are available, with luminosity options ranging between 400 lumens (lm) and 2,000 lm. Each system contains an array on which you screw a bulb.

The major benefit of LED? Big energy savings. For example, an LED Array system is capable of emitting 800 lm with just 5 watts. Getting that much light would require 60 watts from an incandescent bulb, Watkins said.

The largest issue remaining for LED technology is cost. Generally, LEDs are dropping in price, but they’re still several times more expensive than traditional lights. Watkins declined to disclose exact figures on costs of Bridge Lux’s LED systems, but he said on average, LED bulbs are worth upward of $40 apiece, and he can see it driven down to $10 per bulb in the next few years.

Watkins added that Bridgelux’s vertical strategy could make it easier not only to purchase LED technology, but also to more wisely evaluate the cost of implementing the technology (because everything you need to buy is included in a single unit). That could help expedite the growth of the LED market while driving prices down, so we could eventually see these devices in hardware stores and homes.

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