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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?
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
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
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.
.
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
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.
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
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
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.)
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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 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".
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?
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.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
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
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.
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.
~X~