If change is in the air, then it must be the political season. The last time there was a looming presidential election was the last time there was so much attention focused on one issue. Back then, outsourcing was the hot button issue. This time around it’s the environment. And politicians eve-rywhere have decided that “banning the bulb” is the way to environmental salvation.
Is this just another political ploy to grab headlines? After all, we’ve heard almost nothing about outsourcing since the last presidential election, and virtually no legislation of any significance came out of the seemingly endless debate. Now that their attention has turned to lighting efficiency, will the politicians produce useful results, or will they work the issue for all the political mileage they can get before jumping to the next big issue? And why the ubiquitous light bulb? The incandescent bulb has been around for more than a hundred years. Why now?
The War on Inefficient Lighting
Pop quiz: Who uttered these words?
“It cannot be denied that the present methods [of illumination]…are very wasteful. Some better methods must be invented, some more perfect ap-paratus devised.”
Was it:
a. Arnold Schwarzenegger
b. Paris Hilton
c. California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine
d. Nikola Tesla
e. Sponge Bob Square Pants
Hint: It wasn’t California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, who introduced legislation in his state to set minimum standards for the efficacy of general service lamps such as the standard light bulb used in the typical home.
It was, in fact, Nikola Tesla, who, in 1891, presented a lecture before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at the electrical workshop of Columbia College in New York. Tesla was among the first to recognize that Edison’s “perfected” lamp was not so perfect. In fact, it wastes much more energy than not.
Nevertheless, it is Edison’s design that has served for almost 120 years as the light bulb your grandparents, your parents and you know as the one you buy when you need to replace one in your house. But that may be changing soon, courtesy of your beloved state politicians.
Ironically, the first salvos in the war on inefficient lighting came not from the industrialized world, but from the communist world. According to an article by Frances Robles of the Miami Herald, Cuba’s Fidel Castro banned the importation and sale of incandescent bulbs in August 2005, and the Ministry of Basic Industries replaced from 400,000 to 1.2 million incandescent bulbs in Havana alone. A year later, Castro sent between 157,000 to 330,000 compact fluorescent lamps to Belize, along with 12 Cuban volunteers to help 50 Belizeans go house-to-house exchanging the CFLs for incandescents. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, also introduced a bulb ban of his own after his comrade in Cuba did it first.
It wasn’t until three months later, on January 30, that Lloyd Levine announced his intention to introduce his legislation in California. Within three months, similar proposals were initiated in Connecticut, San Francisco, New Jersey, Australia, the European Union and Canada.
Castro’s motivation for turning on CFLs in the Third World is clearly more practical than the altruistic aims of the more industrialized countries. The island’s 3,200 megawatts of electrical generation is running at 50% capacity after having been crippled by hurricanes and having lost the sup-ply of cheap oil from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The resulting shortage has caused blackouts, much tension and even protests where rocks were thrown at government buildings. Increasing the efficiency of household lighting is a quick and relatively inexpensive way of ad-dressing Cuba’s electricity supply problems.
Outside of the communist and socialist countries, lawmakers have additional reasons for legislating out of existence inefficient lighting. The ever-growing chorus of the strains of global warming from environmental lobbyists and activists are seen as a plum voting block for the savvy politician. Some might even be concerned about the environment. But is there really reason to be concerned with lighting efficiency? Just how inefficient is the typical lamp and how much impact does it have on the environment?
The Science of Inefficiency
The original proposal introduced by Assembly Member Levine specifically aimed to outlaw the “general service incandescent lamp” with good reason — the typical 100-watt household incandescent lamp takes about a dollar’s worth of electricity to produce less than a nickel’s worth of light. The rest, about 97.4%, is radiated as infrared or pure heat, completely invisible to the oblivious human eye.
Its overall luminous efficacy — the visible light output compared to the amount of power it takes — is about 17.5 lumens per watt compared to about 45 to 60 lumens per watt for a compact fluorescent lamp. It’s this low efficiency that the politicians are targeting. But because they’re politi-cians and not engineers, most of the original legislation targeted the existing technology rather than the inefficiency, which is the real culprit. What happens if the next Thomas A. Edison comes up with new technology to drastically increase the efficiency of the incandescent lamp?
In fact, General Electric hopes to do just that with the new high efficiency incandescent lamp, or the HEI, which increases the overall luminous ef-ficacy to 30 lumens per watt, almost double the conventional rate. And GE believes it can eventually reach efficiencies of 60 lumens per watt.
Many of the lawmakers have reworded their legislation to set minimum standards for the overall luminous efficacy of general service lamps. In the case of Levine’s California Assembly Bill 722, the bill outlaws the sale of general service lamps with less than 50 lumens per watt starting in 2010. But will this legislation have the desired effect on the environment? And what is the desired effect?
Acid Rain on the Parade
It turns out that about half of the world’s power plants are coal-fired, and they are the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet. Some scientists believe that CO2 emission is the primary cause of global warming. Burning coal also releases other pollutants into the air. In addition to CO2, coal combustion byproducts include sulfur and many heavy metals like arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, cop-per, lead, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, radium, selenium, vanadium and zinc. The sulfur reacts with oxygen and water to produce sulfuric acid, which falls back to earth as acid rain, and the mercury released into the atmosphere is the single largest unregulated source of mercury.
The light bulb legislation is targeting these pollutants in an effort to reduce them enough to make a significant impact. To power a 100-watt incan-descent lamp from a coal-fired power plant an average of three hours per night every day for a year, which is approximately 1,000 hours, it takes about 110 pounds of coal and produces about 200 pounds of CO2. If, instead, we replaced that 100-watt lamp with a 24-watt CFL with an overall luminous efficacy of 50 lumens per watt, it would take about 26 pounds of coal to operate, and it would produce about 48 pounds of CO2, a savings of about 84 pounds of coal and 152 pounds of CO2. In Cuba, where they replaced about a million incandescent lamps with CFLs, they might be saving as much as 42,000 short tons of coal and 76,000 tons of CO2 emissions every year. And according to a press release from GE, if the entire installed base of conventional incandescent lamps is replaced with HEIs, it could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 40 million tons and in the EU by up to 50 million tons of CO2 per year. Australia’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by four million tons per year by 2012.
But Wait, There’s More
In a closed system like a building or a room, all of the heat generated by a lamp has to be removed by the air conditioning system if the room tem-perature is to remain the same. Doing so requires the use of even more electricity.
For example, a 100-watt lamp throws off 341 British thermal units (BTUs) for each hour of use, which increases the heat load by the same. The impact of that heat, and the amount of air conditioning needed to remove it, depends on the efficiency of the air conditioner. An air conditioner with a seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) of 7.5 will use 34.1 watt-hours of energy to remove that heat. In effect, it increases the energy con-sumption of this lamp by 34%, adding to the cost, CO2 emissions and pollution.
The coal and fossil fuels we use to power many of our electric generators are from a finite supply. It was estimated by British Petroleum in 2006 that there was approximately 155 years of reserve-to-production ratio for coal. By increasing the efficiency of lighting, the hope is that we can buy more time to find safe and practical alternative energy.
CFL Is Blasphemy
But even the most pro-green among us has to wonder about the impact all this will have on theatrical lighting. To many of us, banning incandescent lamps in the theatre, television studio, concert tours and even corporate events is tantamount to blasphemy. There are far too many problems with alternative lamp sources to even consider them at this point. Fluorescent lamps don’t render color well, and they can only dim to 1%. Depending on the ballast, they can only trigger on at about 50%, and some of them take a minute or two to reach their full light output. And LEDs present prob-lems of their own — they render color altogether differently than incandescent lamps, they lack an organic feel when they dim and they aren’t quite punchy enough yet to produce the light levels we’re used to.
Fortunately, the politicians seem to recognize that alternative lamp sources aren’t for everybody. Levine’s proposal limits the legislation to general service lamps with a medium screw base, having a wattage rating between 25 and 150 watts, which pretty much excludes the majority of lamps in the entertainment lighting industry. The Australian plan is to similarly draw up minimum efficiency standards as well, with specific exceptions granted to PAR lamps. Andy Ciddor, the president of the Australian Lighting Industry Association (ALIA) has volunteered to help create the stan-dard with the intention of monitoring the legislation and its implications in the entertainment lighting industry.
The Politics of Promises
It would appear that the intentions of the proposed legislation currently sweeping the globe is well placed and could significantly impact the envi-ronment in a positive way. Of course, the nature of politics is such that re-election is typically placed at the head of the political agenda to the det-riment of all else.
As Ciddor observes, the Australian government has appointed an environmental task group to create the new lamp efficiency standard, but no ac-tion will be taken on it until after the upcoming federal elections. “This leaves the government with the option of letting the whole thing evaporate if they are re-elected,” he said. “This particular government is famous for not honoring its election promises.”
Government promises are one thing, but the promise of technology is another. There will come a day when the economics of lighting efficiency make it impossible to ignore. As the demand for fossil fuel continues to rise, the cost of the fuel will increase to the point where the savings from energy-efficient lighting will multiply. At the same time, the increasing supply of alternative light sources will put downward pressure on prices. At the intersection of the high cost of energy and the lowering cost of efficient lighting is environmental salvation. Until then, government mandates for more efficient lighting may be as necessary as the need for seat belt legislation.
To illuminate Richard, write to him at rcadena@plsn.com.
