US Moves Towards Energy Efficient Light Bulbs

Great news on the front page of the Saturday WSJ today: it looks very much as though a nationwide energy-efficiency standard is going to come into force which will essentially force every household in the country to move from incandescent bulbs to light bulbs which are both much more environmentally friendly and, over the medium term, much cheaper to run.

With 4 billion light sockets in the US, this is an opportunity for the likes of GE and Phillips akin to the great move from vinyl to CD. The light bulb manufacturers actually come out very well from this deal, because from now on much more of the total cost of light bulbs is going to go on the bulbs themselves, rather than on the energy needed to power them.

If the standard is agreed upon, that will give the manufacturers every incentive to combine two important technologies, and create screw-in LED bulbs which are also dimmable. The main problem with compact fluorescents is that Americans don't like the quality of light they generate; this is being worked on. But the other big problem is that they don't work on dimmers – and even the new supposedly dimmable ones don't really work very well.

With LED bulbs, all that's needed is a technology which reduces the number of LEDs which light up when the bulb is dimmed. It's not rocket science. Received wisdom has it that LED bulbs are too expensive to appeal to the consumer market; I say test it first. I'll certainly buy them, if and when dimmable LED bulbs come on the market.

This is just the first of what must be many steps towards changes which save both energy and money. Such profitable ways of reducing carbon emissions are the low-hanging fruit: let's have many more!