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

Re:The easy way out

[Alioth]

Actually, it's not Igw's Law, it's already called Muphry's Law (a deliberate mis-spelling of Murphy).

HTH, HAND.

Re:The easy way out

[Khyber]

None of the parties you'd think of, though the thought is indeed entertaining. I'm doing serious horticulture, not your typical weed growing (though that is done in my own controlled lab for personal purposes,) though my panels could easily be used for those and would likely produce incredible product. If it can grow serious horticultural crops, weed is just a simple stepping stone to proving the efficiency of LED tech to the rest of the world since that is the most focused-upon indoor horticultural product. To put it simply, for indoor horticulture, cannabis is the holy grail. If I can grow it with my lights, I can grow ANYTHING.

I attend business mixers, not cannabis cups. Other people do the latter for me, though I explicitly state on my site that I don't condone *ILLEGAL* usage of my product. I have no problem with legal medical growers, as I am a legal medical patient, myself, and thus I would be a hypocrite otherwise to 'hate' upon them for doing their part to be energy-efficient without needing to subject themselves to the horrors of outdoor crop production.