Story

I wasn't skeptical about this story when first writing it up, but simply thought that sad percentage figure on light extraction for LEDs was an informative tidbit for a story. Other technologies have similar inefficiencies due to reflectivity. My casual knowledge of LEDs made me suspect that the figure (though plausible) might be exaggerated, but I didn't immediately find hard numbers out there. Hitting the WP page on LED light extraction to check, again lacked numbers, but that turned-up the link to the BBC article mentioning nanotech+LEDs from 2007...

The mention of PlaCSH solar cells being developed before, that I've never heard of, made me want to know if anything came of it, and perhaps how close to the promised numbers were products realizing in production. A search for PlaCSH didn't immediately turn-up hits on well-known reputable sites, but instead mostly sites with "UFO" and "alternative energy" in their names (no joke). While this research is from Princeton, funded by DARPA and the NSF, that's still a red flag...

Found this source from a few years ago, claiming only a mere 20% is lost in LED light extraction, not TFA's claimed 62%:

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/powersource/4307926/LED-inefficiencies-82-of-lighting-energy-lost-as-heat

And I don't know what's up with the double-link to TFA.