Regulation Spurs Innovation: The Energy-Efficient Incandescent Light Bulb
The big three lighting companies — General Electric, Sylvania and Philips — are all working on energy efficient incandescent bulbs, as is Auer Lighting of Germany and Toshiba of Japan.
Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.
“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”
The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece and more, compared with as little as 25 cents for standard bulbs.
But they are also 30 percent more efficient than older bulbs. Philips says that a 70-watt Halogena Energy Saver gives off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb and lasts about three times as long, eventually paying for itself.
More here.
Via Edward Tenner, “Light bulbs aren’t the only surprise in energy efficiency studies. I was recently amazed to learn from The Green Home site that at least in smaller sizes, cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions actually use fewer watts per square inch than liquid crystal display (LCD) sets”
4 Responses to “Regulation Spurs Innovation: The Energy-Efficient Incandescent Light Bulb”
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The big three have had that that incandescent lighting technology on the shelf for years, they were waiting for cfl and LED bulb technology to raise the consumers acceptance level of high bulb prices to over shadow the limited performance increase for the 3 times higher pricing in the same fragile package.
The big three have had that that incandescent lighting technology on the shelf for years, they were waiting for cfl and LED bulb technology to raise the consumers acceptance level of high bulb prices to over shadow the limited performance increase for the 3 times higher pricing in the same fragile package.
“Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.”
WRONG 'LESSON' [sic]. That's just the idiocy we see now (along with other, starry-eyed, smaller-minded sentiment) behind “alternative energy” mandates, not to mention unrealistically high fuel efficiency requirements for automobiles. Government doesn't deserve “credit” for “spurring innovation.” The best it can hope to do is to be the convenient scapegoat (with a wink and a nudge by all concerned) when all know that there are cost-effective safety measures that can be added to automobiles, for example, but it doesn't pay any producer to be the first to introduce them, making their products more expensive and losing sales.
A general, broad, ambitious inference from that extended to encompass all kinds of nice lib dreams is invalid. Not to mention often harmful.
Even nowadays, we aren't rushing to buy curly compact fluorescent light bulbs. Nobody has any right to compel me to buy them, incidentally.
And if we had an advance where it really counts outside the home, in street lighting, the result is not necessarily going to be limited (stupidly and sickly, even) to retention of existing lighting levels outdoors with substantial reduction in power consumption. A real improvement would make it feasible to greatly increase the amount of illumination outdoors for the same costs we pay today. That direction is where real progress turns, just to name one example.