Tag Archives: lighting

Sure, Congress can regulate light bulbs that travel in interstate commerce, but a “made in Texas, stayed in Texas” bulb…?

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Michael Giberson

The Texas state legislature has passed a bill that affirms that a light bulb manufactured in Texas of materials predominantly from within Texas and sold for use within Texas would not be subject to federal law or regulation under the authority of the U.S. Congress to regulate interstate commerce. The bill further would commit the state Attorney General to defend any citizen of the state of Texas making a “Made in Texas” bulb who is prosecuted by the federal government for violating the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

The bill has passed both the state House and Senate, but not yet signed by the governor. The Natural Resources Defense Council is advocating against efforts to repeal or amend the EISA of 2007 (for example) and is opposing the Texas bill.

In part the bill reads:

AN ACT
relating to exempting the intrastate manufacture of certain incandescent light bulbs from federal regulation.
…
(c) In 2007, the United States Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act (Pub. L. No. 110-140). Section 321 of that act bans the sale of certain incandescent light bulbs in the United States beginning in 2012.
(d) The regulation of intrastate commerce is vested in the states under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the United States Constitution if not expressly preempted by federal law. The United States Congress has not expressly preempted state regulation of intrastate commerce relating to the manufacture on an intrastate
basis of incandescent light bulbs.
(e) The Legislature of the State of Texas declares that an incandescent light bulb manufactured in Texas, as described by Chapter 2004, Business & Commerce Code, as added by this Act, that remains within the borders of Texas:
(1) has not traveled in interstate commerce; and
(2) is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, under the authority of the United States Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

Full legislative information on HB 2510 available at the Texas Legislature Online website.

Saying goodbye to Edison’s hot little light bulb?

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Michael Giberson

Andrew Rice has a great little story in the New York Times Magazine on the upcoming phaseout of the incandescent light bulb. No, the incandescent bulb has not been “banned,” not exactly. It is just that, a few years ago, Congress agreed to raise energy efficiency standards for light bulbs effective January 1, 2012, to a level high enough that incandescent bulbs would not qualify.

The story wraps together a little history, technology, politics, aesthetics, and economics, and adds just a few hints of political philosophy. Nice. A couple of good parts:

Lumileds, a subsidiary of the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips Electronics, specializes in the manufacture of light-emitting diodes (L.E.D.’s), tiny semiconductor chips similar to the ones you’d find within your computer, except that they turn electricity into photons instead of information….

Philips created its L.E.D. bulb to compete for the L Prize, a government-sponsored award meant to encourage the development of a replacement for the 60-watt incandescent before the new standards begin to go into effect in January. Traditional incandescents are extremely inefficient, giving off 90 percent of their energy as heat, not light, and over the years, the government and the lighting industry tried to move consumers on to products like halogens and compact fluorescents. But no amount of subsidy or “green” branding has managed to woo consumers away from Edison’s bulb. “Not only is it in alignment with the type of light that consumers like,” says David DiLaura, author of “A History of Light and Lighting.” “It’s commoditized and it’s cheap.”

So some years ago, Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards. “We felt that we needed to make a call, and show that the best-known lighting technology, the incandescent light bulb, is at the end of its lifetime,” says Harry Verhaar, the company’s head of strategic sustainability initiatives. Philips told its environmental allies it was well positioned to capitalize on the transition to new technologies and wanted to get ahead of an efficiency movement that was gaining momentum abroad and in states like California. Other manufacturers were more wary, but they also understood the downside to selling a ubiquitous commodity: the profit margin on a bulb that sells for a quarter is negligible. After much negotiation, the industry and environmental groups agreed to endorse tightening efficiency by 25 to 30 percent.

And:

The notion of light as a thoughtless commodity would have seemed fanciful to our distant ancestors. Before electricity, light was expensive, a product of exhaustible sources like whale oil. It was Edison who finally took it to the masses in limitless quantities. On Dec. 31, 1879, the inventor invited a crowd of thousands to his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., to witness a demonstration of his fantastic innovation, described in a patent as an “electric lamp for giving light by incandescence.”

Technically speaking, whale oil is a renewable resource, right?

Much of the crucial basic research behind the [Philips L Prize] bulb was done by a specialized group of about 40 Lumileds scientists. They continually work to improve the L.E.D. performance by experimenting with the closely guarded “recipe” used to cook up the diodes by combining molecules of indium, gallium and nitrogen. “The material system is not very well understood,” says Ted Mihopoulos, who heads the department. Minuscule changes in temperature inside a reactor can yield significant variations in color and brightness. People sometimes say that L.E.D.’s are like diamonds; no two are exactly alike. When the time came to build an L Prize prototype, Mihopoulos said he culled the 24 brightest diodes from his lab’s private stash.

Doesn’t exactly seem like a technology ready to jump from the lab to the manufacturing line, but there are still over six months to go before the phaseout (unless Congress intervenes on behalf of consumers wanting to stick with incandescents) so I guess consumers should keep their fingers crossed.

In March, [Sen. Jeff] Bingaman convened a Senate committee hearing on the new standards. Two Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jim Risch of Idaho, used the occasion to denounce free-market infringement. Paul pressed Kathleen Hogan, a D.O.E. official, to say whether she was pro-choice before going off into a long disquisition on liberty. “I find it really appalling and hypocritical . . . that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb,” Paul said. “I really find it troubling, this busybody nature.”

Okay, I’ll admit that – in the summer at least, when I’m paying to cool my house – I’m troubled by all the heat given off by incandescent bulbs. See Energy Circle for an illustration. But count me among the consumers who have tried compact fluorescents (actually have some in my family room right now) and have been usually disappointed by shorter-than-promised lifespans for poorer quality light and at a much higher cost.

L.E.D.s seem like a great solution, maybe someday, but they still need work to outperform the cheap, hot little bulb devised by Thomas Edison so many years ago.

The Economist: Making lighting more efficient could increase energy use

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Michael Giberson

The current issue of The Economist reports on research that concluded “making lighting more efficient could increase energy use, not decrease it.”

SOLID-STATE lighting, the latest idea to brighten up the world while saving the planet, promises illumination for a fraction of the energy used by incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. A win all round, then: lower electricity bills and (since lighting consumes 6.5% of the world’s energy supply) less climate-changing carbon dioxide belching from power stations.

Well, no. Not if history is any guide. Solid-state lamps … will indeed make lighting better. But precedent suggests that this will serve merely to increase the demand for light. The consequence may not be just more light for the same amount of energy, but an actual increase in energy consumption, rather than the decrease hoped for by those promoting new forms of lighting.

Lighting efficiency is just the latest in a long line of examples of the Jevons Paradox – the observation made in 1865 by William Stanley Jevons that increasing the efficiency with which a fuel is used may increase the overall consumption of the fuel. (Also sometimes called “the rebound effect.”)  Jevons observed that improvements in the efficiency of coal use led to increases in coal consumption.

Conservationists and environmentalists sometimes complain about the Jevons Paradox, note the defensive tone from Energy Circle, “The Jevons Paradox: Time to Send it The Way of the Dodo?,” or The Encyclopedia of Earth entry on the paradox. But is isn’t the case that the lower-cost based rebound is always so big as to overwhelm efficiency-based savings.  The key issue, Edward Glaeser reminds us in a recent column, is “that the demand for the thing in question (power, vehicle miles, tasty cookies, cigarettes) has to be sufficiently elastic with respect to the thing’s price.”

The Economist‘s story draws on an article recently published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics by Jeff Tsao and co-authors, “Solid-state lighting: an energy-economics perspective.”  The magazine sums up the piece as concluding that new, highly efficient solid-state lighting could increase the consumption of light by ten times over the next 20 years, and even though those lights will be more efficient, energy consumption for lighting would double (if the real price of electricity remains stable).  That would make for a pretty big rebound.

NOTE: There is much more detail on the assumptions and calculations that went into the conclusion reported in The Economist. Related research is available from Sandia National Lab. Here’s the full abstract of the Tsao, et al. article:

Abstract: Artificial light has long been a significant factor contributing to the quality and productivity of human life. As a consequence, we are willing to use huge amounts of energy to produce it. Solid-state lighting (SSL) is an emerging technology that promises performance features and efficiencies well beyond those of traditional artificial lighting, accompanied by potentially massive shifts in (a) the consumption of light, (b) the human productivity and energy use associated with that consumption and (c) the semiconductor chip area inventory and turnover required to support that consumption. In this paper, we provide estimates of the baseline magnitudes of these shifts using simple extrapolations of past behaviour into the future. For past behaviour, we use recent studies of historical and contemporary consumption patterns analysed within a simple energy-economics framework (a Cobb–Douglas production function and profit maximization). For extrapolations into the future, we use recent reviews of believed-achievable long-term performance targets for SSL.We also discuss ways in which the actual magnitudes could differ from the baseline magnitudes of these shifts. These include: changes in human societal demand for light; possible demand for features beyond lumens; and guidelines and regulations aimed at economizing on consumption of light and associated energy.