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GE Closes Last US Light Bulb Factory
pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the US is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s. What made the plant vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014 but rather than setting off a boom in the US manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas. GE developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs but even with a $40 million investment the new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China. 'Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon,' says Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But 'we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.'"
I loath CFL lights. They don't last ANYWHERE near the reports say they will. Yet the power LED on one of my computers is still happily running (after 24 hours a day for 10 years).
And LEDs don't require you to use a hazmat suit to pick up pieces if you break one (since they contain Mercury).
UPS Sucks
Even with the most conservative estimates for mercury output and the proportion of power generated by coal and the most unforgiving ones for CFL mercury content and power savings, the power saved by CFLs results in less mercury being released into the environment than they could themselves release.
http://www.energy.gs/2007/05/cfl-mercury-myths.html
http://www.energyrace.com/commentary/more_on_mercury_coal_and_cfls_updated/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/news/4217864
In 3 to 5 years when all the CFLs start dying, there will be a huge furor over the mercury they contain leeching into landfills.
Or not.
In the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if all 270 million compact fluorescent lamps sold in 2007 were sent to landfill sites, that this would represent around 0.13 metric tons, or 0.1% of all U.S. emissions of mercury (around 104 metric tons that year.) Compact fluorescent lamp
First, you have the problem of power factor, which means that with fluorescent bulbs, you're often drawing a lot more power than you think, it just isn't getting metered that way.
I'm sorry, this doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about reactive power here? Reactive power is important in grid control... but it is not energy. Energy is the issue here. Fluorescent bulbs do not, in fact, use more energy than incandescent-- they use less.
Second, you have the spectrum of light, which because it is balanced towards the blue end and because it isn't a continuous spectrum, isn't perceived as being of equal brightness.
Actually, the reason that fluorescent bulbs are more energy efficient is because their emission puts out more of its light in the parts of the spectrum that the human eye uses efficiently, not less. Incandescents are way too red-rich. (As should be obvious-- there's no way to get a thermal source to an emission temperature of 5800K, which is the sun's temperature.)
The LED light does actually produce significant heat. It's nowhere near as much heat as an incandescent or CFL, but because LED's have such a very low heat tolerance (heat reduces their lifespan), keeping them cooled them isn't as easy as simply removing the AC/DC converter.
What I don't get is this: if China can produce CFLs at half the price (which doesn't surprise me), then why couldn't they also produce incandescents at half the price? In other words, why hadn't the plant closed long before the advent of CFLs?
My guess is that incandescent bulbs can be made cheaply both in the USA and in China because they contain no environmental pollutants, whereas CFLs, on the other hand, contain mercury, and it's probable that the environmental regulations in China are sufficiently loose to allow them to streamline the manufacturing process in ways that simply cannot be done legally in the USA.
Bad math and Jenny McCarthy-style pseudo science (with a Fox question mark no less!).
I'm ashamed of you slashdot.
Fluorescents are 3x as efficient as incandescents. Yes, the efficiency is exaggerated on the labels because the bulbs don't quite put out as much light as the incandescents they are comparing against. But even if you correct for that fluorescents are far more efficient.
Heck, to prove it, just light up a bulb and touch it. Feel that heat on the incandescent? That's wasted energy that didn't go to light. Now touch an equivalently bright fluorescent bulb, it's only a little warm.
Power factor doesn't mean it's using more power than you would think from the wattage, it means it's using more CURRENT and less voltage. Anyway, changing phase like this (low power factor) doesn't mean that the meter isn't measuring correctly. If this were true, people would be strapping inductors onto the lines in their house right before the meter to get free power.
Power factor is only an issue for the electric company, they have to adjust for it. And they are adept at adjusting for it. This is evidenced by how the electric companies are very interested in you using CFLs, my electric company sends me mail about it twice a year. If the low power factors of CFLs presented problems to them, they wouldn't do this, would they?
If you don't like bluish CFLs, get yellowish ones. There are 3 colors, one is very yellow.
I agree LEDs still have limitations. I'd like to get some for my hallway but I"m not ready to make that move yet.
Dimmers are not suitable for fluorescent or LED bulbs, each should really be dimmed with a control signal instead of a rheostat. Hopefully this kind of technology will be common in homes soon so we can get rid of the buzzing from dimming fluorescent and LEDs.
The government is subsidizing your fossil fuels significantly. You don't see it in your bill, because it isn't being subsidized by giving you money to give the electric companies to pay for electricity. We massively subsidize oil drilling and production.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=how-much-in-subsidies-do-fossil-fue-2009-09-18
Your electric bill would be noticeably higher without these subsidies and solar would look correspondingly a little cheaper.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The forward voltage drop of the LEDs in series limits the current. The LEDs are actually "diodes" (that's the D part) so they don't need a rectifier diode.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Probably similar to the one I had. Made in 1982 or thereabouts. Tub rusted out, so I replaced it with a Whirlpool. Made in Mexico based on a New Zealand design. I can't help it if you bought the cheapest piece of crap around.
My convection oven cost $600 and was made by GE (again in Mexico), though it was quite small. Someone I know spend a couple grand on his large one, which I believe was a Jenn-Aire, not from Germany.