We're catching up on years of backlogged house improvements that we eventually wanted to get around to. One of them is redoing lighting throughout much of the house, going from college-dormesque floorstanding torch lights to various overhead fixtures. This also means rewiring switches all over the house to be linked to the overhead lighting instead of just toggling an outlet. In the kitchen, we really wanted to replace the outdated fluorescent lighting with something a bit more attractive, and reliable. We had changed the ballasts, the switch, the housing, and the tubes a number of times over the years, and there was something about that location that always left it a bit flaky. One way is to replace them all with CFL's, but an increasingly common replacement is now these LED lights that our electrician recommended. Not terribly expensive, easy to install, and they look great. I was worried that the light would look too electronic, or too cold, but the color temp and brightness is just about perfect. They are also dimmable just like an incandescent, which is rare and/or expensive for CFL installs. We went with 9 of the recessed LED lights to illuminate the entire kitchen area. The power usage is minute; at full power they are drawing 11 watts, and provide the brightness equivalent to a 65-watt incandescent. So with all of them at full blast, that's still less than 100 watts continuous, for the lighting traditionally provided by almost 6 100-watt bulbs. California code has some requirements for energy-saving lights in kitchens, but fluorescent, CFL's, and now LED's can all meet that need.
There are also LED bulb replacements for some traditional outlets, like in chandeliers or other light fixtures. Those bulbs can be surprisingly expensive ($40 - $50 and up), but with 30,000 to 50,000 hour lifetimes, they are likely to outlast the current owner of wherever they are installed.
Here's a video of a pretty typical LED can replacement:
Link to original page on YouTube.