by Jeffrey Augustine

The New York Times reported on August 31, 2009 that European consumers were purchasing and stockpiling incandescent light bulbs in advance of the ban on sales of incandescent lamps. The EU ban went into effect on September 1, 2009 and has fueled a sharp debate on the necessity of banning the world’s first artificial light source.  Generations of people have visually adapted to incandescent and halogen lamps, particularly in their homes.  Many of the visual comforts of home are associated with incandescent lighting. For example, curling up and reading a good book under the warmth of 2800K halogen light is a time-honored pleasure, particularly in the winter when inclement weather keeps people in their homes.  People associate fluorescent lighting with work and, likewise, work with stress. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFL’s) visually remind people of work or of glary, over-lighted public spaces such as airports, big box retail stores, or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The New York Times report stated:

“…the light bulb ban has proved singular in the way it has stirred fierce debate. The ubiquity of lighting and the way it can alter the aesthetics of an interior, even the experience of reading a book, makes it somehow more personal.

“…Consumer advocates in Europe have cautiously welcomed the measures but they also have pointed to drawbacks for consumers — especially those who have a special sensitivity to certain kinds of light or need old-style bulbs for health reasons.

‘The blanket ban could spell misery for thousands of epilepsy and anxiety sufferers who are adversely affected by energy-saving bulbs,’ said Martin Callanan, a European Parliament member.” Ref: op cit.

In the 1990’s the lighting industry and the Lawrence Berkeley Lighting Lab worked to develop the Visual Comfort Index (VCI) in an attempt to compare the relative visual comfort of comparable light sources.  This survey and software-based analysis sought to balance the tradeoffs between energy savings and visual comfort. Although the research methodology was interesting, the attempt to achieve a Visual Comfort Index failed due to its subjectivity. Furthermore, the concept of VCI was vulnerable to abuse by lamp manufacturers who wanted to use it to make pseudoscientific marketing claims for the visual performance of their products.

The biggest selling incandescent lamp in the US is the 60-watt incandescent table lamp.  With sales of approximately 1.5 billion lamps per year since 1990, this key lamp type has spurred competition for market share.  Lamp manufacturers have long sought to establish claims of visual comfort by use of trade names to capture a greater share of this lamp type and other popular incandescent wattages, particularly three-way lamps.  However, visual comfort claims were of limited value.  Consumers knew that all incandescent light bulbs relied upon a filament and therefore offered the same, basic visual performance. What persuaded consumers to purchase one brand of incandescent lamps over another were price and extended service life.

Halogen incandescent lamps proved to be a breakthrough for both lamp manufacturers and consumers, as halogen technology truly offered superior visual comfort, extended service life, and could be sold for a significant premium over non-halogen incandescent lamps.  By the year 1998, the lighting industry was selling record numbers of high quality, low cost halogen lamps which were based upon an astonishing twelve decades of incandescent lamp manufacturing knowledge.

Invented in 1878, incandescent lamps were first manufactured and sold in the 1880’s. According to data from the International Energy Agency, annual incandescent lamp sales total 12.5 billion lamps globally. This is a function of their inexpensive cost, beautiful light, and their remarkable 120+ years of actively being sold on a global basis.  By 2002, commercial and residential consumers had widely embraced the beautiful light offered by halogen incandescent technology. Nevertheless, governments around the world were being driven by the realities of geopolitics, and environmentalism had begun to urgently press for energy conservation in lighting.  Their technology of choice to replace incandescent lamps was the compact fluorescent lamp. 

Introduced into service in the mid-1980’s, compact fluorescent lamps were originally designed as a retrofit to screw directly into existing lamp sockets and were in direct competition for the installed, multi-billion base of incandescent lamp sockets.  The most successful retrofit unit of the 1980’s was the circular fluorescent retrofit lamp, which was humorously called the space station lamp as it resembled a 1960’s vision of a space station.  Plagued by high costs and recurrent ballast problems into this decade, CFL’s established themselves early on in the US hospitality industry.  In the 1990’s, hotel guests commonly reported CFL interference with the televisions and radios in their rooms.  The other leading complaint was the poor quality of light produced by CFLs.  In response, the lighting industry worked diligently to improve EMI ballast shielding and to incorporate triphosphor technology into CFLs. The results were CFL lamps that delivered >80 CRI and offered 10,000 hour service life.

While Europe was quick to adopt CFLs, utility companies in the US had to offer consumers rebates, or even free CFL’s, in order to place CFL technology into private homes.  Despite these measures, consumers proved slow to adopt CFLs for their homes.  The initial cost and poor light quality of CFL’s are routinely cited as the two main consumer objections to the technology. There are additional concerns about CFLs as they contain mercury and must be recycled. Consumers do not have an accurate way to assess the risk posed by a CFL being broken in their homes by accident though The EPA has issued general guidelines to consumers on how to clean up broken compact fluorescent lamps. 

Like CFLs, LEDs are also phosphor-based light sources.  Thus, the same complaints about poor light quality have been expressed by consumers. In particular, LED light output is notably blue-shifted.  Further, LEDs have further failed to deliver anywhere near their claimed 100,000+ hour lifetimes.  LED manufacturers are now more realistically stating performance values of ~50,000 hours, thus bringing commercial LED lighting fixtures into the region of the optimized T8 and T5 fluorescent lamp/ballast systems at >40,000 hours.

Despite the innate visual appeal of incandescent halogen lamps, the soaring costs of energy and the dependence on foreign oil in the 2000’s have made it clear to governments that legislation  is required to change consumer behavior.  Accordingly, sweeping laws were passed in the US and Europe to phase out incandescent lamp puchasing.  The reaction in Europe, as noted, was the stockpiling of incandescent lamps by consumers. Any hope for an “incandescent light renaissance” may rest upon nanotechnology. An article published in May, 2009 at the website azonano.com reported on recent research at the University of Rochester:

“An ultra-powerful laser can turn regular incandescent light bulbs into power-sippers, say optics researchers at the University of Rochester.  The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb can.

“The laser process creates a unique array of nano- and micro-scale structures on the surface of a regular tungsten filament—the tiny wire inside a light bulb—and theses structures make the tungsten become far more effective at radiating light.  The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.”

In essence, the laser burst modifies the surface of a tungsten filament, thereby allowing the filament to emit photons far more efficiently when current is applied.  Inasmuch as lasers are only 1% efficient, the energy needed to mass-produce billions of laser-modified filaments each year may not be cost effective.  One of the determining cost factors would be the cost of each “laser shot” and how many laser shots each filament needs.

Compact fluorescent lamp technology utilizes phosphors and mercury.  HID lighting requires mercury, as does induction lighting technology.  LEDs are classed as semiconductor devices using materials like gallium arsenide, aluminum gallium arsenide, indium gallium nitride, and zinc selenide to emit light.. At present, semiconductor devices consume 95% of the world’s annual gallium supply.  What is evident is that metals, especially mercury, are needed to produce usable, affordable and “aesthetically adequate” artificial lighting once incandescent are gone.  The Holy Grail of Lighting is therefore described as a non-toxic, energy efficient lighting source that produces incandescent halogen light quality at a compact fluorescent price and service life.  Such a technology would produce great wealth for its inventor(s) due to the global installed base of billions of lamp sockets and the need for the familiar comfort of warm light.  Until such a breakthrough arrives, however, say goodbye to the tungsten filament that has emitted beautiful full-spectrum photons with the flip of a switch since 1878.

Where is our next Thomas Edison?

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