innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,377
This thread was prompted by a comment on the brexit thread. To start with,I should note that this was not just an EU thing, the USA had already approved the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 with provisions to impose minimum efficiency requirements for lamps.
The allegation was that incandescents were inefficient and wasted energy, therefore should be banned. The actual law set efficiency requirements for lighting, meaning that incandescent lights should still be available for sale for other purposes, but governments cracked down on people trying to sell them as heaters.
The reality is that if you are heating the space you're illumination then a "wasteful" lamp will just replace part of the energy you'd have spent on heating. Unless electrical heaters are banned too there is little point in banning incandescent lamps in cool climates. If you have plenty of electrical power from renewable sources, why ban lamps that also heat? And it's arguable whether the alternatives to incandescent lamps were actually less wasteful. They are certainly less recyclable and more polluting as garbage.
I see people actively replacing LED lights in place of working lighting fixtures, mostly fluorescent and CFL, that previous replacement that was forcefully pushed on people and turned out to not be pointless. They do it because they think it makes sense, where they think it makes sense. No ban was necessary for that. The real reason for those ban, I suspect, was corporate lobbying by companies that could not milk old technology that seemed to have nothing left to improve and patent. The EU pretended the new regulations would allow consumers to save on new lights:
This would refer to electricity costs, but a more realistic value would be about 4 billion euros. A newer, post-ban report puts the total consumer expense for lighting in 2013 at 65 billion euros. An order of magnitude larger. And the graphic here shows increasing costs even as LED lights take over.
It would appear then that consumer spending on energy for the lights is far below consumer spending for the actual lights, and forcing people to buy new lights (and often fixtures, as CFL did not live long when they couldn't dissipate heat) does not save them money. Consumers should be allowed to replace them when it makes sense for the specific cases, not by withdrawing options from the market. The electronics on the newer lights are sensitive to on-off cycles and tend to have lower lifetimes in certain environments.
Worse, the projected savings on electrical consumption that were used to justify the ban were based on reports commissioned to justify the ban (projections, aka what are you paying us to say?), and facts have disproved them. The claim back in 2009:
And the EU 's own admission in 2019:
Now we have LED lights, so do they make better sense? Probably, and more people now seem to believe so. LED lights are better that the CFL ones, but they're not better everywhere, and users should be able to choose. They continue to contain more hazardous waste that the glass, tungsten, aluminum, ceramics and brass the old incandescent ones required. Many of the LED lights in the market now have awfully bad driving circuits, in terms of radiofrequency noise generated. Manufacturers won't be able to produce them cheap if they have to include proper, shielded circuits. And these cheap circuits still tend to fail very early under certain conditions such as high on/off cycling.
What have been your actual experiences with lighting in the past 10 years? Were you happy with CFL over the older filament lamps? Are you happy with LEDs? And agree with baning older technologies? Personally, I object to such bans when no objective harm is directly attached to a technology. In this case it is arguable wether wasting energy justifies a ban, it could be argued that energy is wasted on all sorts of things that are not banned. But I'm actually more worried about the electronic waste in the new lights used, most of which will not be recycled, than the energy waste of the old lights.
Someone told them incandescent lights were banned by the EU, and thus they feel deeply that incandescent lights must be good and something they wish to support.
The allegation was that incandescents were inefficient and wasted energy, therefore should be banned. The actual law set efficiency requirements for lighting, meaning that incandescent lights should still be available for sale for other purposes, but governments cracked down on people trying to sell them as heaters.
The reality is that if you are heating the space you're illumination then a "wasteful" lamp will just replace part of the energy you'd have spent on heating. Unless electrical heaters are banned too there is little point in banning incandescent lamps in cool climates. If you have plenty of electrical power from renewable sources, why ban lamps that also heat? And it's arguable whether the alternatives to incandescent lamps were actually less wasteful. They are certainly less recyclable and more polluting as garbage.
I see people actively replacing LED lights in place of working lighting fixtures, mostly fluorescent and CFL, that previous replacement that was forcefully pushed on people and turned out to not be pointless. They do it because they think it makes sense, where they think it makes sense. No ban was necessary for that. The real reason for those ban, I suspect, was corporate lobbying by companies that could not milk old technology that seemed to have nothing left to improve and patent. The EU pretended the new regulations would allow consumers to save on new lights:
Five to ten billion euros per year are expected to be reinjected into the EU economy.
This would refer to electricity costs, but a more realistic value would be about 4 billion euros. A newer, post-ban report puts the total consumer expense for lighting in 2013 at 65 billion euros. An order of magnitude larger. And the graphic here shows increasing costs even as LED lights take over.
It would appear then that consumer spending on energy for the lights is far below consumer spending for the actual lights, and forcing people to buy new lights (and often fixtures, as CFL did not live long when they couldn't dissipate heat) does not save them money. Consumers should be allowed to replace them when it makes sense for the specific cases, not by withdrawing options from the market. The electronics on the newer lights are sensitive to on-off cycles and tend to have lower lifetimes in certain environments.
Worse, the projected savings on electrical consumption that were used to justify the ban were based on reports commissioned to justify the ban (projections, aka what are you paying us to say?), and facts have disproved them. The claim back in 2009:
The EU-27 electricity consumption in 2007 of non-directional light sources in all sectors is about 112.5 TWh (VITO 2009). This is approximately 4 % of the EU-27 total electricity consumption with 2.95% being used by the domestic sector and 1.05% in the non-domestic sector.
And the EU 's own admission in 2019:
In 2013 CFL lights had successfully been pushed to displace the old incandescent ones. Yet the domestic consumption of energy had not been reduced, it went from 84 TWh to 93TWh, with only one small territory (Croatia) added. CFL were a total disaster as a strategy, projections that they would "take over" were superseded by the new focus on LEDs barely two years after they were made, and the industry has given up on them. But they certainly made a tidy profit selling that crap for a few years thanks to the ban. In a rather ironic twist, the same EU that pushed CFL lamps with the argument (among others) that it was worth the investment of converting because they'd be more efficient and long-lasting is now also going to ban them in the revise Ecodesign regulations. There should be a special place in hell for researchers who take grants for producing reports ordered to justify bad policies.The share of the residential sector [in 2013] is 93 TWh/a (24%)
Now we have LED lights, so do they make better sense? Probably, and more people now seem to believe so. LED lights are better that the CFL ones, but they're not better everywhere, and users should be able to choose. They continue to contain more hazardous waste that the glass, tungsten, aluminum, ceramics and brass the old incandescent ones required. Many of the LED lights in the market now have awfully bad driving circuits, in terms of radiofrequency noise generated. Manufacturers won't be able to produce them cheap if they have to include proper, shielded circuits. And these cheap circuits still tend to fail very early under certain conditions such as high on/off cycling.
What have been your actual experiences with lighting in the past 10 years? Were you happy with CFL over the older filament lamps? Are you happy with LEDs? And agree with baning older technologies? Personally, I object to such bans when no objective harm is directly attached to a technology. In this case it is arguable wether wasting energy justifies a ban, it could be argued that energy is wasted on all sorts of things that are not banned. But I'm actually more worried about the electronic waste in the new lights used, most of which will not be recycled, than the energy waste of the old lights.