Poll: Thoughts on the Phase Out of 40 & 60 Watt Light Bulbs
The environment is an area I’ve written about before, including energy use and lighting. If you haven’t been paying attention, you may be in for a shock:
Starting Jan. 1, the U.S. will stop manufacturing and importing incandescent light bulbs in favor of ones more energy-efficient.
The phase out started with 100-watt and 75-watt incandescent light bulbs in 2012 and 2013. The last phase out will include the 60-watt and 40-watt. (Source)
Stores may sell their current inventory, the government is slowly forcing us to switch to more efficient lighting choices. Before you blame President Obama, he was just a Senator when the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was passed by Congress and signed by President Bush.
Now that we’re at the final stage of the incandescent bulb phase out, I’d like to know your thoughts so the poll this week is: 40 & 60 watt incandescent light bulbs on store shelves are the last ones, thoughts?
I’ve provided a variety of answers but I’ve also given you the option to enter your own answer. The poll is in the right sidebar.
— Steve Patterson
If you don’t think that the government should be in the bedroom (gay rights, abortion), why shouldn’t that extend to light bulbs, as well? I choose to make many energy-efficient choices in my life, but there are also places where cheap, warm, incandescent lamps are my choice. The best way to discourage the use of incandescent bulbs would be to create financial incentives – tax ’em and use the proceeds to subsidize LED R&D and manufacturing infrastructure. Once LED’s offer similar color rendering qualities and much-extended life at competitive prices, they’ll take over the market, naturally. As it stands now, by eliminating the proven, low-cost option, there’s less incentive to reduce costs!
The always dependable free market libertarian viewpoint. Ok, so we tax incandescents to the point they cost as much as LEDs in order to subsidize private manufacturers? Then they’ll take over “naturally”? Yes, the not-at-all-free market at work!
There’s a difference between banning and incentivizing. LED’s are already dropping in price, while incandescents are a very mature industry. My point had less to do with a “free market libertarian viewpoint” and more to do with government choosing to not just regulate, but to outright prohibit, anything that is not inherently dangerous. There’s a continued push to ban abortions, trans fats, illegal immigrants, guns, tanning beds, marijuana, gay marriage, incandescent light bulbs, texting while driving, wood burning fireplaces, sagging pants and on and on and on! I agree that incandescent lamps are inefficient, I agree that there are better choices for “the environment”, I just don’t agree that the government needs to be the nanny state / big brother on each and every issue out there, and to ban what is already a dying technology.
You lump all bans into one category, yet the ones you listed are very unique. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, no convenient ban all or ban nothing answer. With light bulbs it has to do with US energy policy, a role only the US Government is qualified to set.
Just like they’re “qualified” to pass the Defense of Marriage Act?!
Apples & oranges, please stop trying to use the fact I’m gay to attempt to convince me the government shouldn’t use sticks in addition to carrots. It’s offensive and tiresome.
It has nothing to do with your orientation – I don’t agree with the government’s overbearing position on either issue. You may view it as apples and oranges, I view them both as government overreach into what we, as individuals, should be free to choose. This year it’s light bulbs, next year it could be limiting the total square footage in a residence (bigger homes use more energy than smaller homes), the sale of charcoal grilles (propane is far cleaner), the sale of charcoal and/or firewood (yes, they pollute) and on and on and on. Hell, if we really want to save energy, the government “ought” to ban the resale of St. Louis’ old, solid-brick homes – the insulating characteristics of their solid masonry walls are poor and there’s rarely much insulation under their roofs. Lighting is a small (but a highly visible) part of our monthly Ameren bill – focusing on the real energy hogs (refrigerators, freezers, portable electric heaters, air conditioning, dehumidifiers and hot tubs, to name a few) would yield far greater results than banning 100 watt light bulbs!
http://www.efficiencyvermont.com/For-My-Home/ways-to-save-and-rebates/Appliances/Refrigerators/General-Info/Electric-Usage-Chart
It has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with consistency and lack of hypocrisy.
You expect me to support or oppose all bans to satisfy your sense of consistency? Sorry, I can distinguish between bans based on fear among the religious and the greater good for the general public. All bans aren’t created equal.
As I said in my other comment, fluorescent lights don’t promote the greater good.
BTW, the religious also think they’re promoting the greater good. Why are their concerns about the structure of society less valid than your concerns about sea level rise?
Science vs dogma.
What science?
(Yes, I believe that global warming exists. No, I’ve never seen any numbers showing that the costs of global warming are greater than the costs of preventing it. That’s dogma.)
With respect to lighting, try lumens per watt: http://www.mge.com/saving-energy/home/lighting/lumens-comparison.htm
You take one isolated statistic, and ignore the much higher purchase cost (and similar failure rate for most brands), and more serious health concerns, and inferior performance, of fluorescents. When all costs are considered, fluorescents are worse for you and for the environment. But we have to use them. That’s dogma.
Formulas aren’t a statistic or dogma.
When an incandescent bulb breaks, you sweep it up and replace it. When a fluorescent bulb breaks, you get toxic mercury all over the place. Fluorescents are also inherently inferior in their time to reach full brightness, cold weather performance, and so on. And most brands of fluorescent bulbs do not actually last longer than incandescents. All of these problems greatly outweigh the contribution of incandescents to global warming.
When I was an undergraduate in the late 80s I went on a day trip from Oklahoma City to Dallas with a group of architects had fellow students to see a high tech lighting center with the latest technology. In the early 90s I did the same thing, but in the Chicago area. Over the years I designed many spaces but rarely using fluorescents because of their inherent flaws.
I’m an advocate of LED lighting, it will replace incandescent and CFL. I can adjust my lighting from cool or warm in seconds — from my phone!
I agree, LED lighting will eventually replace incandescent, fluorescent, metal halide and HID in most applications. Where we disagree is on implementation. 90 years ago (1924), pretty much everything used incandescents. 60 years ago (1954), standard fluorescents were making big inroads into institutional, industrial and commercial applications. 30 years ago (1984), electronic ballasts for fluorescents, halogen, metal halide and high pressure sodium lamps were seeing increasing use in both residential and commercial applications. NONE of these evolutionary changes occurred because of government mandates, they occurred because they made financial sense – a higher initial cost was quickly offset by lower energy use and less maintenance. The same thing will happen with LED’s, with or without a government ban on incandescent lamps, as the quality gets better and prices drop.
In both residential and commercial applications, there will always be little-used spaces where inefficient-but-cheap will be the better choice. Whether it’s an elevator machine room, an attic or an unfinished basement, having the option of installing a $4 keyless fixture with a $2 lamp (that is on less than 20 hours a year) just makes financial sense. Even spending $15 on a cheap fluorescent assembly wouldn’t make any financial sense, nor would it have ANY impact on the environment – if anything, the more complex manufacturing impacts would exceed any actual energy savings. That said, this only applies to little-used applications – those seeing daily use should (and most often) do focus on greater efficiency.
The US has been involved in regulating energy policy for decades: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog432/node/116
And not always all that successfully. Efforts have included tax credits for solar heating in the ’70’s and ’80’s (how many of those systems are still around) and, more recently, questionable investments in biofuels and the whole cash for clunkers debacle. I don’t object to setting goals and to creating incentives or disincentives for meeting them. I do object to outright banning any specific technology, just because “better” theoretical options may (or may not) be available. One good example is the gas guzzler tax and requiring auto manufacturers to post estimated mpg’s – buyers are given both useful information (to make an educated decision) and disincentives (gas guzzler taxes), but if they still want to splurge on that Corvette or Ferrari, they can! The government has also, rightfully, established higher energy efficiency standards for major appliances and HVAC systems, as well as water reduction requirements for plumbing fixtures (but they didn’t outright ban anything). The difference is in the outright banning of incandescent bulbs – yes, there are better options, but they are all more expensive, and some are way more expensive. People aren’t stupid – most act in their own best interests – we don’t need big brother looking out for our light bulbs!
The other half of the equation is that any light that is turned off uses zero energy! Turning off every other streetlight in the city would save some serious dollars and carbon, but hey, we can never be too “safe”! http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/
I totally agree. Lighting is all relative. As you increase lighting levels somewhere, the human eye adjusts. Light that use to be sufficient now appears dim. It’s a constant one-upmanship, and it’s ridiculous how bright outside is.
Those new digital billboards consume more electricity, 30,000 kwh per month, more than a typical home consumes in an entire year, 11,000 kwh – why is the government ignoring those?! http://bigguhn.com/public/Digital%20Billboards%20Are%20Here.html . . http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3
Is the government ignoring them? How do the current billboards compare to billboards from 20 years ago with respect to energy consumption?
The current, old-school, static billboards are slowly getting more energy efficient, as lighting moves from metal halide to LED. Typically, there are 5 or 6 uplights for each image area that are probably in the 150 watt range, each. Doing the math is pretty easy – 6 lights x 150 watts x 12 hours / day x 31 days/month = 334,800 wh or 335 kwh per month, or, not surprisingly, less than 2% the electricity used by the new digital ones.
The reason that the new digital billboards make any economic sense, at all, is that there are no significant labor costs in creating (printing) the images or installing and removing the images. Combine that with the ability to sell the space multiple times, even at a lower per-image price, as opposed to only once, and the economics start to make sense along busy corridors (like freeways).
And to answer your question, the government isn’t ignoring them. Unfortunately, most government oversight has to do with aesthetic, light-trespass and revenue issues (permit fees), not energy use. I’m not aware of any current efforts by the government to regulate energy use on signs, other than to limit hours of operation at the local level.
LED digital billboards are more energy-consuming than traditional billboards for a number of reasons, but primarily because they are lit 24 hours a day — perhaps ironically they use more energy in the day than at night. I believe the feds helped fund a pilot initiative in sunny Florida for a few solar-powered billboards that might be able to send power back to the grid but not sure how effective that turned out to be.
Face it – energy prices are subsidized. What you pay for a kilowatt-hour of electricity is not what it costs to produce, monitor, clean up after, and of all the side effects to society. Those are costs borne by taxpayers. I am not for government interference in little minutiae like light bulbs, but for the fact that taxpayers pay for a portion of every kWh consumed.
In that case, I am all for the phase-out of 40- and 60-watt bulbs. I do not want to subsidize the use of 60-watt heaters as sources of light.
Please explain how, exactly, they’re subsidized? Everything in life can’t be subsidized – someone would have to be paying for more than they’re getting – there is no infinite trough of free money!
Please tell me you don’t think the production of electricity in the US is a free market outcome? Of the billions in annual subsides the bulk is on coal, refined coal, natural gas, and nuclear. See http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
How energy is subsidized? Look no further nuclear power. Every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is subsidized. Liability insurance for nuclear plants is subsidized. The fund to manage decommissioning reactor sites is massively underfunded. There is a production tax credit on new nuclear power. There is an entire government bureaucracy dedicated to managing nuclear fuel and waste.
It’s not limited to nuclear power. Superfund sites at coal mining operations, externalities of pollution…it’s all borne by somebody, and that is not paid through the incremental cost per kWh.
I’m not pretending that every single cost can be explicitly allocated in the cost of a unit of electricity. However, that doesn’t mitigate the fact that taxpayers as a whole already have a vested in the use and effects of energy production. So it is not unreasonable to take basic steps to enforce efficiency standards. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to subsidize someone else’s energy use.
“Federal coal subsidies are forms of financial assistance paid by federal taxpayers to the coal and power industry. Such subsidies include direct spending, tax breaks and exemptions, low-interest loans, loan guarantees, loan forgiveness, grants, lost government revenue such as discounted royalty fees to mine federal lands, and federally-subsidized external costs, such as health care expenses and environmental clean-up due to the negative effects of coal use. External costs of coal include the loss or degradation of valuable ecosystems and community health.
According to research by GigaOm analyst Adam Lesser, buried in a 2011 report from the International Energy Agency is the fact that fossil fuels currently receive subsidies via “at least 250 mechanisms.”[1]
In June 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said $557 billion was spent to subsidize fossil fuels globally in 2008, compared to $43 billion in support of renewable energy. In a July 2011 EIA report on federal fossil fuel subsidies, coal was estimated to have tax expenditures (provisions in the federal tax code that reduce the tax liability of firms) with an estimated value of $561 million in FY 2010, down from $3.3 billion in FY 2007.[2]” http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Federal_coal_subsidies
In the real world we know the one receiving the most subsidies will prevail. “California’s nuclear energy industry has received four times more federal support than the state’s distributed solar builders over a period six times as long, according to a new report.
“California’s nuclear power suppliers have benefited from over $8.21 billion (in 2012 dollars) in subsidization over the last half century,” according to the report Ask Saint Onofrio: Finding What Has Been Lost in a Tale of Two Energy Sources by Nancy E. Pfund and Noah W. Walker of Silicon Valley venture capital firm DBL Investors.” https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Report-Nuclear-Received-4-Times-More-Subsidies-in-CA-Than-Solar