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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.'"
GE needs to team up with Cree and retrofit their factory for making the next generation LED bulbs.
This is a great solution to the 'too many patents' problem in a story earlier today. No lightbulbs means no ideas right?
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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 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. 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.
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
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
"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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
As mentioned in the article it costs 50% more to make them locally. Personally I don't think that 1st world economies should have to compete against 3rd world labor laws, non existent environmental standards, and be forced to collude with the government to get subsidies and manipulate the currency exchange just to be competitive. So until things change for the better, no we shouldn't encourage more jobs to go overseas by legislating light bulb usage.
"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.
Debatable about the innovation (read some of the comments)
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Ah, the good old US government, not only reducing US jobs but also reducing consumer choice in something as simple as choosing what type of light bulb you want.
Because god damn it I should have a RIGHT to burn as much energy unnecessarily as I want. I have a RIGHT to be an irresponsible, planet destroying, jackass who clings to obsolete and inefficient technologies. How DARE the government force me to utilize a less polluting, longer lasting technology. [/sarcasm]
Choice has costs that go much beyond your consumption preferences. I like old cars but there are reasons modern cars have modern pollution controls. If you can't behave responsibly, eventually others are going to get annoyed at your selfish behavior and you might not like their solution. Incandescent bulbs consume more power than available substitutes and that has national energy policy implications that are much more serious than your annoyance that you have to use a different type of light bulb.
This is just a symptom of the operating focus for GE. They no longer have a consumer interest. There are several companies working on high efficiency Halogen bulbs using IR reflective coatings to reflect heat back against the filament. In addition there is a significant amount of work updating the tungsten filament itself, basically sputtering the wire to texture it. GE has put little effort into updating their manufacturing technology, just milking it for profit. I recently swapped my 75 Watt PAR 30 lamps for 48 Watt lamps with the same Lumen output. Philips brand, though I have no idea who manufactures the coated capsules for their bulbs. The light output is excellent quality. Most of my general purpose lighting is CFL, modern CFL is very good, but I find that direct tungsten is more comfortable for reading, and these high efficiency Tungsten bulbs are very nice. Certainly less efficient than 18 Watt CFL, but much better than the 75 Watt Halogens they replace.
I am not going to fault GE for their shift in focus to commercial, that is just the way it is.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I wish some Westinghouse award winner would say "In the name of Nicolai Tesla, I say shove it up your ass! I don't accept awards from a company started by a thief."
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
unborn fetuses
Thank goodness the born fetuses are safe.
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?
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.
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
We've all been duped on the CFL lights. I think they are dead-even with incandescent lights as far as "carbon footprint"; here is why: I switched all of my bulbs to CFL about 2 years ago. I have had 4 of them "burn" up. They get really, really hot, emitting that burnt electronics smell and go out.
Regular filament bulbs:
Glass and metal
CFL bulbs:
A little mercury vapor
glass
phosphors
printed circuit board
resistors
capacitors
metal
solder
transformer
Ok, the CFL save some energy, but they sure add more pollutants (the circuit boards and mercury) to the system WITHOUT the long-life promised.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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
Dear oh dear.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Not to mention producers will have to lower prices to reduce the cost of living for those workers. That will inevitably happen anyway as the corporations economically devastate their own market for the sake of short term returns. Unemployed people don't buy much.
The assumption that increasing the efficiency of light sources will decreae energy use for lighting is nothing more than that -- an assumption not based on any actual evidence. There is some evidence that increasing energy efficiency actually increases energy use because energy becomes a cheaper input.
See:
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/5176/Energy-Conservation-and-Future-Energy-Demand
and...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
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.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
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)
Why? Because you want more mercury released into the environment?
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?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It is also all in the name of "being green", but how much more polluting are the overseas factories, and the cargo transports to get all those bulbs back over to the U.S.?
You call storing them until you go to buy more and then having to remember to take them with you easy. It may not be hard, bit it is a hassle. Most people will just throw them in the trash.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I think if you add a resistor in series with the halogen bulb you may be able to bring the temperature down enough so that the color is the same as that of a regular incandescent bulb. I know that running halogens at too low temperature shortens their life, but a small decrease actually increases the life.
When the light bulb in my oven finally burns out, I wonder how well the CFL I replace it with will perform?
Anyone?
Last one out, please turn off the...
Bugger
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.
If it's simple, perhaps you could show us the math behind it?
And they are required to by law.
http://library.findlaw.com/2002/Dec/19/132442.html
The high-frequency ballasts that run these bulbs have been around for 20 years at least.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Try here: http://www.earthled.com/
Home Depot is also starting to stock LED bulbs.
I have two EarthLED bulbs, a ZetaLux and EvoLux. They were not as cheap as I'd like, but the problem was that the ZetaLux is too long (5.5") and the EvoLux has a fan that is already quite noisy when the light is on, after only 1 year of use. Only the EvoLux has the Sh model that is the normal 4.5" height like all the regular bulbs and CFLs, so it can at least fit into common fixtures, but the fan sucks.
I also have a Oznium.com X5 that is apparently no longer for sale. It's pretty dim, maybe a 40W replacement at best, but it was only 4" tall and cheaper than the EarthLEDs.
The new ZetaLux 2 line looks interesting. They were not available last year and might actually be what I'm looking for. Size is 4.2", price is $35 for the Pro. 550 lumens might be bright enough. No fan making noise. I'll have to order one and see. Price could be lower and 550 lumens could be higher, but it's an improvement on the old models.
Morphing Software
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
Ain't that the truth. They won't need to declare war -- they'll just need to stop selling us shit.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
I can only speak to what I see as an importer, and nothing in that article reflects the reality of my business, my customers, my competitors, or my vendors. I wonder if those very large companies are getting some sort of tax breaks or environmental waivers for moving to the U.S. Also not explained is that China is monthly beating its own exporting records.
There are some products where labor is not the primary cost of concern. Mechanized production is generally the same price everywhere in the world as the primary costs for production are raw materials, which are the same everywhere. The costs of concern will then fall to regulatory requirements and tax policy.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Actually, after looking at the article...no, it's not the one down the street from me(though that one is closing sometime soon) so the one they're referring to is NOT the last one to close...
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
If reactive power were power, then the laws of thermodynamics wouldn't hold, because the power in minus the power used (emitted as heat and light) minus the reactive power would not be net zero.
And again, when the power factor drops, it doesn't changing anything about the power used, it only means you're using more current and less voltage. This does mean the electric company has to have more current available unless they can use proper capacitive or inductive adjustments to work around it. And they are good at working around it. This is why they don't mind and in fact suggest you use CFLs.
Motors cause the same problem, so A/C presents a big issue to the grid. They're already rigged to deal with it.
CFLs are 3x more efficient in lumens per watt (or perhaps a bit more). This is for equivalent amounts of light. Your argument that you need to add more light is no more valid than saying you need to add more light with incandescents.
Yes, if you replace a 90 watt incandescent with an "equivalent" CFL replacement it will be dimmer, because the marketing people for CFLs are listing bogus figures. But even adjusting for this, CFLs are still 3x more efficient per lumen And that is a BIG difference.
> Psychologically speaking, blue-tinted light is perceptually darker than reddish light even if it is of far greater brightness in terms of your actual ability to see and distinguish objects and color. And other things like skin tone are poorly perceived in fluorescent light as well, which contributes to that perception.
No it isn't. The eye is most receptive to green, which is right between blue and yellow and the eye picks up on both yellow and blue very well. Bright blues are not seen as nighttime, they in fact are seen as very bright. See mercury vapor lamps, arc lamps, metal halide lamps, an acetylene torch or even the sun.
Color rendition is a complex issue. If you get a CFL with the proper color temperature (just look at the CFL page on wikipedia), then skin tones look correct. Due the line spectra in fluorescent light, some other things may not render well depending on the CFL and the object. If you have an object which is colored through dyes, and it's trying to be green by mixing blue and yellow (instead of having any actual green reflection to it), it may look different under fluorescent light because the mix of blue and yellow emitted may not be equal on the CFL even if the overall color temperature is good. Again, note that skin is not one of these things. In general, recent fluorescent lamps are pretty good on color rendition (see color rendition index) but still are not as good as a hot radiator like incandescent bulbs or the sun.
> Fluorescent lights produce a discrete spectrum with very little coverage of the red end of the spectrum at all.
This is not true. Just look at the picture on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp
See the line spectra? The yellow to red area is very well covered.
> And if you have a power factor of 0.5 (not at all uncommon for CFLs), you are effectively only getting a 1.5x difference in wattage in terms of peak generator capacity.
Not only is 0.5 not uncommon, but figures close to it like 0.55 are the most common by far. But as to the latter part, again, this is all fixed by adjustments in the grid, these higher current peaks are not seen at the generators.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
There's still a market (and legal exemption) for specialized incandescents where CFL/LED/HID won't work. Like inside ovens. Maybe that's what's made there.
Someone had to do it.
Dimmable CFLs are expensive, and sucky.
I bought some dimmable CFLs recently (and no, I'm not going to mention a brand, because I don't believe that the brand printed on the box makes any difference with CFLs).
I plugged them into my Lutron dimmer switch, and fired 'em up. Lousy. Slow to turn on, horrific color. Actual dimming range went from "bright" to "a bit less bright," and then straight to "completely dark."
So much for trying to be energy-efficient in my office. They do work well enough with a regular light switch in the pantry, but that's about the best use I could come up with for them -- the color of light produced is too unpleasant for any place where people actually spend time.
The experience was bad enough that when I decided (a bit more recently) to install better lighting in my office, I did a complete polar opposite and put up MR16 halogens on a track. They dim just fine, and they're pretty. They're also expensive to run, but the office is almost always just lit by the dim glow of a few LCD screens, so I decided that I didn't need to care about efficiency.
Kid-proof tablet..