According to Bloomberg:
Congressional Republicans renewed their effort to save the traditional light bulb, passing a measure to block federal energy standards that have come to symbolize government overreach for many consumers but are largely embraced by manufacturers as the cost of the newer bulbs has plummeted.
The House passed an amendment to a spending bill late Wednesday to block enforcement of Energy Department rules requiring manufacturers to phase out sales of incandescent light bulbs to cut power use. While the measure faces an uncertain future in the Senate, its sponsor called it an important victory for freedom.
"Congress should fight to preserve the free market," Representative Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican, said on the House floor before the vote. Burgess said he had heard from tens of thousands of people about how the regulations "will take away consumer choice when constituents are deciding which light bulbs they will use in their homes."
This is beyond stupid.
I have undertaken two projects in the last two years, replacing incandescent lights with LED bulbs, one in my home and one in a commercial building. In both cases the energy savings were substantial.
Home savings can be hard to measure as not all lights are on in your house, all the time, and depending on the time of year, even the lights you use frequently will vary as to how long they are on. Commercial installations are a different story, so let me give you an example.
I replaced 52 400w high bay light fixtures in a warehouse. The warehouse runs 11 hours a day (M-F) and 6.5 hours on Saturday. That works out to 61.5 hours a week, or 3,198 hours a year.
52 lights x 400w x 3,198 hours = 66,518 kWhs per year, which at 9.61 cents/kWh comes to $6,392.42 per year just to keep the lights on.
The lights I replaced them with were 200w LED fixtures that actually provided better illumination than the old lights. So, back to the math.
52 lights x 200w x 3,198 hours = 33,259 kWhs per year. Half the previous amount. Oh, I also installed occupancy sensors on the lights so that they shut off when no one is in the area, which meant the lights are only running 75% of the time during the day and NO lights are on at night (whereas we would always leave a few on in case we had to enter the building after dark). So, now our energy consumption is down to 24,944 kWhs per year, with an annual cost of $2,397.12. So, JUST replacing the old light fixtures with new LEDs cut out lighting expense by $3,995.30 per year.
But how much did we spend on new fixtures and installation? Well, roughly $20,000, but half of that was picked up as a rebate from our utility company which pays for stuff like this (being that it is cheaper to get industrial customers using less power than it is to build more power plants), so our pay back is roughly 2.5 years. The fixtures are rated to last 12-15 years at that usage, so, ignoring inflation, we are talking about a minimum $37,955 in savings over the life of the fixtures and 498 megawatt hours of energy NOT consumed.
Oh, and I have seven more buildings to go.
Here we have a classic example of ignorant “truthiness” versus empirical fact.
Please use this example to educate others.
P.S. — Not included in this computation of cost for the sake of simplicity, is the expense over 12 years of replacing 3-4 of the old 400 watt bulbs, nor the cost of replacing at least 1 ballast per fixture. Over time, as ballasts age, they tend to burn even more power to operate, hence the fixtures we replaced were actually using around 10%-20% more power than they did when they were new. Bulbs cost about $40 each installed, and ballasts cost around $200 installed. At a minimum this would translate into an $16,000+ on top of the higher energy use for the old lighting.
