LEDs forever!

The U.S. made the right call on lightbulbs

By Andrew deLaski
Washington Post, April 8

Andrew deLaski is executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of consumer, environmental, energy-efficiency, utility and state government interests.

Remember the hue and cry about how the federal government was going to force consumers to switch from the incandescent lightbulbs we’ve used since the days of Thomas Edison to those curlicue compact fluorescent ones?

Now, just a few years later, there has been almost no political sniping as the Energy Department has proposed a lighting standard that would move the United States to a record achievement in energy efficiency.

How did lighting standards go from being a political hot potato to something that the lighting industry and American consumers embrace? It all started when Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007. The result of the law, which President George W. Bush signed, is that incandescent lightbulbs are becoming a relic of the past. For $5 apiece or less, a far more energy-efficient light-emitting diode (LED) bulb can light an interior room or your front porch and work just as well as, if not better than, Edison’s invention while using a fraction of the electricity and lasting up to 25 years. That long life means you would no more need a dusty box of spare bulbs in the basement than you would need to keep a spare clothes dryer or washing machine on hand.

(More here.)