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.'"

Comments

You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[darkmeridian]

Yes, it sucks that the market for candles disappeared but you have to adapt and compete. If you can't make CFLs competitively, then you lose your job. It's that simple.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[Darkness404]

This isn't that the market for candles disappeared but rather the government banned candles. This is not the free market at work but rather the government screwing us (again)

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[epiphani]

Please explain how the government mandating energy efficiency is equivalent to the government screwing us.

The government keeps your energy prices artificially low. I think that gives them the right to make sure you're not pissing away energy. Or would you rather electricity was five times the current price?

I actually might prefer that. But I also make significantly more than the average person.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[darkmeridian]

Well, then, it's like lead manufacturers getting really pissed when the government ruins their business by banning leaded gasolines. Governments regulate shit all the time. It's part of the business environment. If you can't adapt, you deserve to get wiped out.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[Luckyo]

If CFLs are really so wonderful then there's no need for the government to get involved because people will buy them instead of ordinary bulbs. But they're not, so they're being forced on people who don't want them.

You're missing the obvious point ON PURPOSE. The point is that no one will switch to a cheaper version that requires more initial investment, even if it clearly saves a lot of energy.

It has been like this for most more efficient technologies on customer side. Until the initial investment is either heavily subsidized, or the previous one banned, progress will not happen. This is basic human nature, to use the old thing "that works", and bitch about "new thing that doesn't work (exactly like the old one used to)".

Fun part: if you don't buy the cheapest bulb, but a quality one for a 30-50% higher price then the trashy one, most of the problems people whine about when they talk about CFLs and LEDs go away. Which again brings us to stupidity of being cheap.

There's an old saying: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things".

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[FlyingGuy]

You are an idiot, it's just that simple.

No industry in the US can compete with another country where the wages are 1/100th of what a similar US worker needs to get paid for doing the same job.

Have you noticed the prices of any of the following going down to a level that a worker can can still have a decent lifestyle in this country while being paid the equivalent of wages paid in China which is less the ONE dollar an hour?

• Housing
• Land
• Transportation
• Food
• Utilities ( electricity, heating oil, natural gas )
• Clothing
• Education

Think you can live anywhere in this country making One dollar an hour? Or anywhere in the UK making One Pound an hour? Or anywhere in the EU making One Euro an hour besides perhaps in a dumpster behind a Wal-Mart?

What kind of job do you have? i bet it is in IT. Trust me, if they could figure out a way to outsource your ass to China, they would and that person might be getting paid the Chinese equivalent of 5 dollars an hour. Can you live where you live right now and maintain your lifestyle on 5 dollars an hour? Yeah I didn't think so.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[SomeKDEUser]

Look, I have to live in North America for a few years. Now I can see the consequences of the absence of gov regulations on efficiency. The washing machine is a model which is technologically on par with the cheapest model on sale in supermarkets in Morocco (I shit you not). It was hell getting a cooking surface in vitro-ceramics. Convection oven? No can do unless you import it from Germany and sell a couple organs.

It is a huge joke. Of course they can't sell their junk outside of America: the rest of the world has moved on, and although the transition to ever more efficient systems meant the the consumer had to pay a premium along the way, the end result is that the quality of everything you buy is so much better that after having seen it both ways, I can tell you: it is worth it.

Because the sad economic fact is that there is some price people are ready to buy for any widget. If the efficiency of the widget is mandated, you get the efficient widget at that price. Otherwise you get the cheap to manufacture widget at the same price. This is why the US is losing manufacturing to China, and Germany is not: there is plenty of room in the high end, there is infinite potential for innovation, but you have to help it happen. And people hate change: even if the alternative is in all ways better, they will not change (think linux and windows). Change is social. There is a strong role of government not in innovation, but in forcing companies to innovate, through the means of efficiency targets, for example.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[Xyrus]

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.

Bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Do you honestly think for one second that a power company would honestly not charge you if you were actually consuming more power than you really are? Do you think for one second that power companies would offer INCENTIVES to switch to CFLs if they were really consuming more power and were less efficient than incandescent lights? Or is there some other inane reason why a company would purposefully put itself into a position to be forced into building out infrastructure to support the power demand of all these inefficient CFLs?

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. To get the same perceptual brightness, IIRC, you are drawing slightly more power with fluorescent bulbs than with modern incandescent (e.g. halogen) designs, and approaching that of plain jane incandescent bulbs.

Subjective nonsense, and also incorrect. I have 100W "warm" (2500-3000K) CFLs that are just as bright as any 100W incandescent I've ever used, and they use a fraction of of the energy. Since the human eye is most responsive to green light, then physically speaking CFLs should appear BRIGHTER as they have a strong emission line there. Your visual preferences may differ.

And that's before you add in things like the increase in depression [fullspectr...utions.com], suicides, and cancer [reason.com] linked with fluorescent lighting.

Correlation is not equal to causality. That should be pretty damn obvious in your second link. Your first link also is not a surprise, and has little to do with flourscent lighting. It's well know that lack of adequate lighting over a period of time can contribute to problems like depression if you already have them. Incandescents won't help. Sunlight will. Locking kids up inside for 8 hours a day with no sun exposure isn't going to improve with incandescent bulbs. Nor will the cost of the massively larger power bill and maintenance cost for replacing the damn things every 3 months.

Regardless, if there was a serious issue I'm pretty sure someone would have raised it by now. Or is there another conspiracy in there you're just itching to tell us about.

We're getting massively screwed.

Yes we are, but not by this.

BTW, the government isn't subsidizing energy significantly. Maybe a little, but certainly not a favor of two, much less five.

ROFL.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[Miamicanes]

> does it matter? oh were out of coal and natural gas, time to rape the poor people after they just bought 14$ lightbulbs

I don't know about where you live, but the United States most certainly is "out" of neither. The US has more coal and natural gas than it literally knows what to do with. The problem with coal is that it nasty stuff every inch of the way, from mining to burning. The problem with natural gas is its low energy density, so the only way to viably transport it in bulk long distances in quantities larger than those needed to fuel an occasional barbecue is via pipeline... and US pipeline capacity is grossly inadequate right now. The good news is that new pipelines are under construction... and have been for the past 10 years. The bad news is that they're still about a decade away from making a meaningful dent in winter capacity shortfalls. In the long run, though, if push came to shove, the US has enough of both to last for centuries... at fairly low prices, too.

I personally don't understand the fetish everyone seems to have with LEDs. Joules per lumen, there's almost no meaningful difference at room-lighting quantities between the energy use of CFL and LEDs. Heatsink fans aren't exactly powered by goodwill.

Fluorescent tubes are great when you need lots of relatively diffuse light. LEDs are great when you either need a tiny, tiny bit of light with minimal ceremony or drama, and when you need a fair amount of very, very directional light. They make great backlights, indicator lights, and spotlights. They suck for general room illumination unless you go to ridiculous lengths to try and herd a few hundred of them into simulating the radiation pattern of a normal light bulb. Both have their appropriate uses, and so do incandescent bulbs. I wouldn't use an incandescent bulb for a main light in my house that burns for half the day every day. I most certainly WOULD use an incandescent bulb in a shed where it might burn for 20 minutes per week, and a CFL would be corroded by Florida's climate within a year or two. Humid, salty air does really ugly things to CFL bulbs when you use them in conditions that are semi-indoors, but not climate-controlled (like sheds, garages, etc). I know, because the CFL bulbs in my porch light seem to average 8-14 months of life before they die... incandescent bulbs in the same fixture lasted for years.

Sold out by GE?

[Desert Raven]

OK, how exactly were they "sold out by GE"?

The plant wasn't profitable currently, was going to be made obsolete by law in a couple of years, and was not even remotely profitable to refit to producing the CFLs.

So they should just pay people to work for the heck of it?

It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory to

[Joe The Dragon]

It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory town where works are just meat and they work super overtime with no overtime pay. Also over seas it costs less to pay off / bribe gov into looking the other way over them breaking over time and worker rights laws.

GE...is looking out for themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

GE is looking out for themselves. Making light bulbs overseas is cheaper, so they do it without one bit of shame. Which is fine, they're a corporation, their duty is to their shareholders. If their shareholders want profits, they have to do it cheaper.

The US government has duties to the citizens. Unfortunately this can put some citizens out of sorts, because the needs of the whole may be different. Sorry, but it happened with the buggy whip makers, it'll happen with the light bulb ones.

Hopefully these employees are getting retraining, education, and whatever other resources they need to find jobs. You can certainly differ over whether or not the restrictions of light bulbs are appropriate, but we can't just throw our hands up and do nothing. If you have better ideas, please give them instead of just offering criticism.

I would rather hear dumb ideas than just hearing that you think all ideas are dumb.

Re:GE...is looking out for themselves

[sjames]

This is not a buggy whip situation. This isn't GE stubbornly continuing to make a product with diminishing demand. This is the inability to compete on price alone against cheap sweatshop labor. This is the Federal government failing utterly to do it's job to the detriment of all but the richest segment of the population.

Sometimes free markets are a real bitch

[zerofoo]

In the manufacture of physical things it's very hard to compete with companies operating in other countries that have less worker protections, less environmental protections, and non-existent employee benefits.

Either we stop buying from manufacturers located in these countries or we push our legislators to prohibit the import of items manufactured under these conditions.

OR

We lower our standard of living to a 3rd world standard to "compete". Is throwing away your standard of living worth cheap light bulbs?

-ted

Re:It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory

[couchslug]

"It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory town where works are just meat and they work super overtime with no overtime pay. "

The reality of competing with cheap workers will require a reset so our workers become cheap. Productivity is high with few workers, but if more workers are to have jobs, they will have to work for less, live less well, and be like the rest of the world.

The main reason the US did so well for so long was it was the "last country standing" after WWII, which was the best thing ever to happen to the US economy.

Misplaced sentimentality

[sjbe]

marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.

In other news GE has sold their buggy whip division...

This is not sad news except maybe for the employees who work there. Incandescent bulbs are a technology which has seen its day but it's day is pretty much at an end. They'll continue to be manufactured for some time but not by GE. Anyone who would expect GE to continue to manufacture an obsolete product with rapidly dwindling market share is a moron. The growth opportunities in lighting are with newer technology such as CFL and LED lighting. This is not something to shed a single tear over. Sentimentality in a situation like this is just bizarre.

they don't specify bulb type

[YesIAmAScript]

Just efficiency levels. You can choose any technology that meets that efficiency standard.

When energy costs and availability affect our way of life and security so much, using a statism to attack a move as logical as this just doesn't make sense.

Re:Why didn't they push LEDs instead of CFL ?

[westlake]

And LEDs don't require you to use a hazmat suit to pick up pieces if you break one (since they contain Mercury).

Urban legend. Light fingered

lighting is 20% of a home energy bill

[YesIAmAScript]

So that's 1/5th of all the energy used in residences.

That's not minuscule.

Your last argument is ridiculous. Every bit counts, just because one thing isn't done doesn't mean another thing done isn't useful.

And by they way they ARE mandating better fuel standards. The CAFE (required fuel economy average of cars sold) goes up 2.5mpg next year (first raise in a decade) and will go up another 4.8mpg over the next 8 years.

Re:Good old selfishness

[Trepidity]

I already do have the right to burn as much energy unnecessarily as I want, though. The government didn't even ban most of the bigger ones; they banned a really tiny one that seems to be mostly out of image and spite.

To use your example, driving old cars is not banned, and they're even grandfathered in from just about all newer regulations. Running an unnecessarily ridiculous 500 Watt home computer is not banned. Keeping your home air-conditioned to 72 degrees (which many peopl actually do) is not banned either. Buying a Hummer 2 to go grocery shopping isn't banned. Installing single-paned windows isn't banned. Etc., etc.

Plus in my particular case, incandescent bulbs are around 100% efficient. I live in an area with a climate that's around 50-60 most of the year, which is cool enough to need some heating, but not cold enough to be worth the expense of getting a gas furnace installed. So I use a moderate amount of electrical heating to keep it up around the mid-60s (I don't really mind it being somewhat cool). Any "waste heat" from bulbs, the stove, or the computer substitutes 1-for-1 for the electrical heater.

Of course, you could ban electrical heaters, too. ;-)

Re:CFLs won't last

[seeker_1us]

You are not supposed to be throwing them into landfills. The labels on the back of the packaging say that. Its easy to recycle them. When I buy new CFLs from Lowes, I bring the old ones in and drop them off at the front desk. End of story.

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.

and we can save about 2/3rds of that

[YesIAmAScript]

So this can cut energy usage in the US by about 1.75%.

And you say it doesn't count? That's a lot of energy.

Passenger cars use about 14% of the energy in the US. You would like to increase fuel economy average in cars 5mpg. This would reduce that energy use about 15% (5mpg out of 32mpg). That's an energy reduction of 2.2%.

So you ridicule one mandate as trivially small and suggest one that is only 25% larger as the real answer? Especially when the lighting one can be much more easily implemented as it is much easier and cheaper to replace light bulbs than to replace your car.

Re:The easy way out

[MrNaz]

The Cree MCE can push 1000 lumens with about 10W of power. There are other LEDs as well (SSC P7, SST-90) that can output this sort of lumen count. However there are no standard type bulbs that feature it, as the problem with LEDs is that they dissipate the heat into the fixture rather than radiate it forward. This means that the fire hazard is an issue, unless your roof is made of fireproof material. Radiating heat into the room is a non issue, as rooms are usually large enough that this is not an issue. A small area just behind the light getting very very hot, however, is an issue.

For this reason I think that the LED problem is simply one of designing fixtures where the heat sink is designed such that the surface that the LED is mounted on has significant surface area facing the same direction as the LED. This may mean complex designs, but light fittings are already complex because interior designers are a bunch of loonies. Now they'll actually have a reason to make that room lamp look like a gigantic vagina.

Re:It's easy for stuff to be 50% less in a factory

[nickmalthus]

Actually what needs to happen for America to stay competitive with China is for an oppressive fascist authoritarian government to seize power and subsequently squelch all dissent as party loyalist pillage the country. Then we would be apples to apples the same as China and that future doesn't seem to be too far off.

Re:CFL "Green?"

[DragonWriter]

These bulbs are far from environmentally friendly or “so called green” and is another example of how foolish laws attempting to “manage” people’s behavior create more long term problems. Each bulb contains about 5 milligrams (mg) of mercury, a toxic heavy metal that can interfere with the development of children and unborn fetuses and may cause a wide range of health issues in adults, including brain, kidney and liver damage.

The mercury released from a CFLs deposited in a landfill if they aren't recycled is, with the current electricity generating mix in the US, less than the average quantity of mercury released into the environment from electricity generation (burning coal) to supply the additional energy consumed to power incandescent bulbs over CFLs. (Source)

I personally would rather live with the consequences of the incandescent lamp for a while longer.

Why? Because you want more mercury released into the environment?

Re:Government wants to control your thermostat!

[Trepidity]

FWIW, I think thermostat threshholds aren't actually entirely ridiculous. For residential usage I imagine there'd be a backlash, but there's no reason so many square feet of office space have to be a/c'd to 72 or even 70 constantly.

For home energy usage, though, why micromanage what I do within my energy budget, so long as my total energy usage is quite low? I personally hate CFLs for reading, and I don't think my three total incandescent bulbs (225W total when all on) are really killing the environment. That's why I think just going by total usage is more fair. If my neighbor wants to run a ridiculous thermostat and television, and I don't, why can't I use my energy savings on something I prefer? My whole apartment probably uses less than 50% of the average energy around here, so I'd pass any actually objective threshholds anyone chose to impose.

But with this per-item efficiency thing, I can't run 225W of incandescent bulbs, but my neighbor can run 2000W of home-theater equipment? How is that fair or pro-environment?

Re:huh

[Pentium100]

Incandescent lights are probably more expensive to ship. They take up as much space as CFLs but are much cheaper, so the shipping cost makes up for a larger part in total cost.

Re:Blame it on minimum wage laws.

[the eric conspiracy]

Any adult working a minimum wage job in the US qualifies for public assistance in a variety of ways. Employers who pay this wage are effectively being subsidized by the government.

There is no benefit to the US economy to have subsidized businesses operating in its economy. And subsidized low wage employees are a disincentive to capital investment to improve the productivity of workers, which is ultimately a drag on the economy.

China's low wages, effectively managed by excessively low Yuan valuation are a big disincentive to modernization there. Eventually I am sure that China will realize that mercantilism on the scale they are attempting won't work - you can't drag 1.3 billion people to modern consumer lifestyles by selling cheap light bulbs to a country with a population of 300 million.

We just don't need that many light bulbs.

And building an economic model based on sub min wage workers who are government subsidized so they won't starve is flat out stupid.

Re:Good old selfishness

[Spoke]

Not only that, but you can get a 3x improvement in efficiency by replacing those inefficient electrical resistance based heaters with a heat-pump.

A standard 90% efficient gas furnace will also be more energy efficient than electrical resistance heating (since the best power plants are only about 60% efficient and most of our electricity currently comes from burning fossil fuels.

Now - if you life in an area where most of your electricity is generated from renewables or nuclear - that changes things a bit.

Re:The easy way out

[mcrbids]

BTW LED lighting is my job so prepare for a MASSIVE smackdown if you wanna go toe to toe.

Sensitive much, methinks. Therefore, I conclude that either A) You are really an idiot with just enough knowledge to think he's "in", or B) You are really somebody I don't want to know too well.

In either event, I'm guessing that you probably don't get invited to many parties.