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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, January 14, 2008

Banishment for the bulb

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In his column for the February (print) edition of EDN Europe, Darnell’s Jeff Shepard comments on the announcement that Ireland intends to, effectively, outlaw the incandescent light bulb – following the lead of countries such as Australia, but putting it into the vanguard of any such moves in Europe.

I’ve written before that I don’t expect that, if you replaced all of the domestic incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents, it would make very much difference to our overall energy budgets – at least, at the latitudes I’m writing from and of Ireland.

(Why? Where I write, I sit in a heated and thermostatically-controlled environment for at least half the year. Waste heat from light bulbs, computers and anything else adds to that environment and – if it has any measurable effect at all – will reduce the controlled input from the heating system needed to reach the thermostat’s set-point. Net energy saved in the total system; zero. In the months when I don’t need the heating, the hours of darkness – at 52 degrees north – are also much reduced.

The really big users of lighting already use more efficient technologies – high-pressure sodium in street-lighting, conventional fluorescent tubes in offices, and so on. I concede, of course, that in lower lattitudes where air-conditioned environments together with incandescent lighting may be more common, the argument for replacement by compact fluorescent technology has much more force.)

I also have doubts about the move to formally outlaw incandescents for another reason – it will lift some of the pressure from makers of cfls to improve their product. If the market is going to be forced to buy them, instead of having a choice, why bother to improve them any more?

I have had several generations of cfls in service in my home and the improvements over time have been significant. Early versions were slow to ramp up in brightness, and had very “peaky” spectral output resulting in poor, often downright unpleasant, colour rendition. And they were anything but ‘compact’.

The latest ones are better – smaller for a given power rating, and (almost) instant-on, though the colour rendering still has some way to go. Without any means of measuring it, it’s possible to see that by (presumably) blending, adjusting and developing phosphors, the lamp makers have produced a spectral output that is much smoother, although subjectively it doesn’t yet approach the continuous spectrum of an incandescent in terms of being a pleasant ambient illumination.

Keep it up, guys, on the product development, or we all face a future in which our homes look like strangely-hued cave dwellings.

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