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The new monarch is the light-emitting diode, or LED, and it's poised to have an enduring reign. Over the past decade, scientists, engineers, designers, and policymakers groomed the LED to rule, coaxing it to do everything an incandescent could do, but with a fraction of the energy. An LED bulb provides the same amount of light as an incandescent while using 90 percent less electricity and lasting 25 times longer. The 2014 Nobel Prize in physics went to the scientists who invented the blue LED.

"This is absolutely an Edison-level revolution in lighting technology," said Morgan Pattison, president of Solid State Lighting Services and an adviser to the US Department of Energy's lighting research program.

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