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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
If the recent history of lighting is any indication, few people will switch to new light sources simply out of a love for the environment.
"Most people, if you ask them if the environment is important to them, they'll say yes," notes Kelly Gordon, who runs Lighting for Tomorrow, a Department of Energy-sponsored program that aims to bring consumer-friendly fluorescent lights to the consumer market.
But people's affection for Edison's light bulbs can often run deeper than their affection for the earth, and convincing them to ditch incandescent bulbs requires an appeal to the bottom line, or to the eye, Gordon says. "You need to get in the messages about how it will save you money on your electricity bill -- and that it'll provide you very good light."
And this is where, for many consumers, the suspicion comes in. Can an alternative lamp ever produce good light as easily, reliably and warmly as a trusty old bulb?
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In the late 1990s, researchers at the Department of Energy became concerned that residential fluorescent light bulbs were floundering in the marketplace. Compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs -- the name applied to the fluorescent bulbs that screw into standard lamp sockets -- are significantly more efficient than incandescent bulbs; for each watt of electricity they consume, fluorescents produce more light and less heat than standard bulbs, making a 27-watt fluorescent just as bright as a 100-watt incandescent bulb.
But the early compact fluorescents weren't very appealing. For one thing, they required a large initial investment -- even though they were often cheaper than incandescent bulbs in the long run, the fluorescent lights were selling in stores for more than $10 each, scaring people away. The lights also weren't very compact, making them not very pretty around the house. Plus, many of the compact fluorescent lights just didn't work very well. "They buzzed, they flickered, and they didn't last as long as they were advertised to last," says Linda Sandahl, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "The technology just wasn't there yet."
In order to spur innovation in efficient bulbs, Sandahl led a team at the lab that challenged lighting manufacturers to build a better fluorescent bulb. The lab asked companies to produce a very small CFL that didn't flicker and that carried a one-year warranty, all for a target price of $5 per bulb. In return, manufacturers would be connected to high-volume buyers, including some of the nation's largest utility companies, which would guarantee a market for the new bulbs. Sandahl says that several manufacturers responded to the challenge with innovative designs -- they created curious-looking bulbs in which the fluorescent tube was twisted, spiraled or folded near the base of the lamp, making for a significantly smaller light. A total of 17 different bulbs were created in response to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's program, and the lab set up a Web site -- now called BetterBulbsDirect.com -- to channel the new lights from small manufacturers to large-volume buyers.
The program proved successful; the new, better CFLs entered the market just as the power crisis began to hit California, and utilities offered residents coupons and other incentives to purchase the new bulbs. Compact fluorescent lamps now represent around 3 percent of the residential lighting market, Sandahl says -- and in New York, California and the Pacific Northwest, they account for substantially more than that.
