Tuesday 4 September 2012

Why ban lightbulbs?


You could make a case for mandating energy efficiency requirements for lightbulbs and banning less-efficient incandescent bulbs in a country without an effective carbon tax or emissions trading regime.
But can you make the same case where we already have emission trading? It's a bit more difficult.

It’s hard to make any sense of the reversal of former Government policy on incandescents other than in the most cynical of political terms. It is in direct contradiction to any concern they express to tackle climate change. Lighting has been estimated to use nearly 20% of the world’s electricity and six years ago the International Energy Agency produced a report which concluded that a global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world’s electricity bill by nearly one-tenth. It is a low-hanging fruit in the reduction of carbon emissions. Even the US is to phase out incandescents.
Many people are making the switch to efficient bulbs without Government direction. It makes economic sense to do so after all, in addition to the clear environmental benefits involved. But Government also has a responsibility to advance energy efficiency by appropriate regulation, as other free market economies have recognised.
Let's go back to first principles.

A lightbulb has three sets of associated cost. The first is a fixed cost for the bulb; the second is the ongoing cost of electricity to run it. A third and today largely ignored cost is disposal at end-of-life: some of the fancier lightbulbs come with greater risk of leaching nasty stuff into landfills and so either impose that cost or impose the cost of more careful disposal.

Power generation has some associated external cost to the world through carbon emission. While most electricity generated in New Zealand comes from renewable sources, the marginal unit often comes from coal-fired generation. And so emission abatement has some external benefit. Absent the full costs of power generation being internalised into the price of electricity, you can make a second-best case for regulatory interventions to push people to the choices that they would have been making in a full-carbon-costing world. Now, there's a problem in that electricity is also used in the production of lightbulbs, and if the non-priced carbon embodied in the production and distribution of more efficient bulbs sufficiently outweighs the non-priced carbon embodied in incandescent bulbs, the result could reverse. I have no clue about either, but it would be awfully surprising if fluorescent and LED bulbs did not have more carbon emissions associated with their production than comparable incandescent bulbs - I would expect that differences in embodied non-priced carbon would be proportionate to differences in the cost of the bulbs. But let's stipulate for now that the ongoing flow of carbon is lower for the more modern bulbs, especially as they have a longer replacement cycle. Always keep in mind that it's not easy being green: when prices don't fully incorporate costs, alternative methods of calculation have non-trivial associated problems.

But this doesn't hold when we already have a reasonably comprehensive emissions trading scheme. Electricity is in the system, even if farming isn't quite there. If the permit system is working well, there is absolutely no case for banning incandescent bulbs. Even if incandescents are less efficient at producing light, they're not all that bad at producing heat. And for two thirds of the year, at least here in the South Island, that isn't all waste. 

If power prices incorporate carbon charges via the ETS, then there's no real economic case for pushing consumers to choose bulbs they don't want. If the ETS isn't working well, then all kinds of consumer and producer decisions will be out of kilter and we do far better by trying to make the ETS as clean across the board as possible rather than mucking about in individual markets. You're then forced into a political second-best argument that it's impossible to fix the ETS but perhaps possible to get political support for pushing on a few important markets. But, again, it's awfully hard to tell in any of those individual cases whether we're doing net good in doing so. The UK thought it was doing good in adding food miles; they'd missed that our pastoral systems have lower overall greenhouse gas emissions. 

In very important ways, the problem facing somebody wanting to intervene in particular individual markets to try and fix the problems caused by not having a good ETS are similar to the problems facing somebody trying to run the old Soviet economy. I'm not trying to make a dumb ideological point about Greenies here: rather, it's about information and its dissemination through a system. The Soviet planners had to figure out how rationally to allocate scarce investment resources in a world where they couldn't really tell how much consumers valued anything; that's a hard-to-impossible problem to solve. An environmental planner working in a world without either a comprehensive carbon tax or an equivalent ETS has a parallel problem in trying to figure out all of the environmental upstream and downstream costs of any product, its substitutes and its complements, and of all the processes used to produce it and its substitutes and its complements. Art Carden explains it in more depth. Product-by-product intervention is awfully likely to produce environmental absurdities. You don't have to be a climate change denier to oppose piecemeal interventions of this sort.

18 comments:

  1. On your point about lifecycle analysis: an interesting study fresh from a kneejerk and poorly formulated search on google:



    http://www.osram-os.com/osram_os/EN/About_Us/We_shape_the_future_of_light/Our_obligation/LED_life-cycle_assessment/OSRAM_LED_LCA_Summary_November_2009.pdf
    Granted this is from an LED bulb manufacturer but it was critically reviewed (or so it says). The upshot is that, for equivalent burn time, the embodied manufacturing energy (kWh) is lower for the LED and the CFL than the incandescent - that is to say nothing of the energy in use over that burn time.

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  2. How do they manage to have lower embodied energy and still cost $100 for a bulb? I'd love to flip our whole house over to LEDs, but then I look at the price, and, well, nah.


    No time today to do a thorough analysis on that report. But do they consider all the embodied energy costs of all the machines that are used to make LEDs compared to the machines that are used to make incandescents and their relative life cycles? Of all the materials that go into building those machines? Of all the equipment that goes into extracting the materials that are used to build the machines? It iterates back rather a long way if you want to do it properly.

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  3. Hi Eric,


    You can flip your whole house over, check out:


    http://www.dealextreme.com/c/led-light-bulbs-1072



    and free delivery - 4-10 bucks (US) a bulb.

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  4. Yep, so am I, it's free international delivery from Hong Kong. I've bought several bulbs myself, been very happy with the service. Delivery can take a while (3-5 weeks) - I believe it's often by ship - which should help to keep the energy budget of the bulbs low!

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  5. It's true Eric, DealExtreme is great. I've bought several cheap techie toys from them, free delivery worldwide no matter how little you buy. Awesome site.

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  6. I don't understand why Bryan Walker wants to ban only incandescent bulbs. Exactly the same argument extends to banning all light bulbs. It makes "economic sense" for individuals to stop using electric lighting altogether, since the bulbs cost money to buy and money to run. Many people are not choosing to make the switch to no electric lighting without Government direction so "the Government has a responsibility to advance energy efficiency by appropriate regulation", no?. Of course, an economist, might claim that if people bear the full resource and environmental cost of using electric lighting, then by revealed preference, the benefit they get from that relative to the alternative, must exceed the cost. But clearly Walker doesn't accept this argument for incandescent versus efficient bulbs, so why accept it for efficient bulbs versus none at all?

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  7. The flat I moved into this year was entirely fitted out with incandescent bulbs. I wondered why for a short while and then it struck me that if you're occupying a place for one year then you won't recoup the investment in CCFLs so are better off sticking with $0.60 incandescent lights.


    Obviously the student rental market isn't large enough to justify such government intervention however I can see the case carrying across to various low-income groups. A single new CCFL could easily make up over 10% of my weekly supermarket shopping.

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  8. In places where landlords cover utilities, you'd expect they'd have some incentive to put them in where it covers cost.

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  9. As you say "If the ETS isn't working well, then all kinds of consumer and
    producer decisions will be out of kilter and we do far better by trying
    to make the ETS as clean across the board as possible rather than
    mucking about in individual markets."
    Isn't that the real point?
    Is the NZETS working well? Is it effectively designed and "fit for purpose"? Geoff Bertram for one says "No its not". Do you have a view on this Eric?

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  10. The ETS isn't terrible. A first best has the whole world using something like an ETS or carbon tax (I prefer the latter). In the second best, it's harder to say whether we should quickly impose charges on sectors where we'd push a lot of carbon generation overseas to places that don't have the system or whether we should add sectors in with some regard to both their ability to adjust production to reduce emissions and to the likelihood of production moving overseas. Whatever you want to argue about agriculture, though, the ETS handles electricity just fine as best I'm aware; that's where the lightbulbs come in.

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  11. There are fundamental points here you seem to be missing

    1. Energy saving is not the ONLY reason for buying a bulb - or anything else (cars, houses, electrical products) - you want to use!
    Forcing a given product to use less energy affects other parameters such as performance, appearance and/or weight etc as well as price.
    See Ceolas.net which also has an extensive light bulb section.

    Turning to electricity:
    The first question is if NZ citizens should be forced to save electricity at all.
    If there is no society shortage, given the great use of renewable sources you mention, and new sources on top of that, it is surely debatable.
    If, in turn, they do have to use less electricity - especially from coal, also for emission reasons (CO2 relevance or not):
    Light bulbs don't burn coal or release CO2 gas
    Power plants might, and might not
    If there is a problem - Deal with the problem

    The light bulbs are not banned for being dangerous.
    They are banned to save electricity

    If saving electricity is such a big deal for NZ,
    then the electricity - or the coal used - could be taxed
    = let people themselves decide how to use the electricity they pay for, again given that incandescent lighting, like all lighting, has its advantages!
    Even if the bulbs had to be targeted, they could themselves be taxed, such that NZ gov directly makes money (unlike from a ban) while "people not just hit by taxes" in that some money could go to lower the price of alternatives.
    Taxation still unjustified, compared to market competition measures (support new alternatives to market but without continuing subsidies) - but preferable for all sides, compared to bans.

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  12. 2. The Actual energy/emission saving of switching light bulbs

    As you say, there is a documented heat replacement effect.
    But the NZ ban was put off for other reasons, including the effect on NZ grids of replacing fluorescent bulbs, given their higher power factor (not same as power rating!) Effectively a greater energy waste from fluorescents than supposed.
    The NZ research also linked
    http://ceolas.net/#li15eux
    Of course consumers have to pay for this eventually. Also many other reasons why switchover energy savings less (manufacture, transport, recycling of more complex bulbs less easily locally made, etc)

    Keeping the correct Focus:
    What is important for Society is not a Big Brother concern of what Johnny saves in switching his bedroom bulb, but what Society saves from a Society law.
    And the savings are negligible....
    "The total reduction in energy use would be 0.54 x 0.8 x 0.76% = 0.33%, This figure is almost certainly an overestimate...Which begs the question: is it really worth it? Politicians are forcing a change to a particular technology which is fine for some applications but not universally liked, and which has disadvantages.The problem is that legislators are unable to tackle the big issues of energy use effectively, so go for the soft target of a high profile domestic use of energy... ..This is gesture politics."
    Cambridge University Science Network on the EU ban, similarly for USA etc given the references, and no doubt similar NZ and elsewhere too.
    A fraction of 1% energy use, or c 1% grid use perhaps saved (not taking into account the other energy usage factors)
    - but that is still not the whole story

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  13. (I tried to link this to my previous comment in thread but that was not possible)



    2. The Actual energy/emission saving of switching light bulbs


    As you say, there is a documented heat replacement effect.
    But the NZ ban was put off for other reasons, including the effect on NZ grids of replacing fluorescent bulbs, given their higher power factor (not same as power rating!) Effectively a greater energy waste from fluorescents than supposed.
    The NZ research also linked
    Ceolas.net/#li15eux
    Of course consumers have to pay for this eventually. Also many other reasons why switchover energy savings less (manufacture, transport, recycling of more complex bulbs less easily locally made, etc)


    Keeping the correct Focus:
    What is important for Society is not a Big Brother concern of what Johnny saves in switching his bedroom bulb, but what Society saves from a Society law.
    And the savings are negligible....
    "The total reduction in energy use would be 0.54 x 0.8 x 0.76% = 0.33%,
    This figure is almost certainly an overestimate,
    particularly as the inefficiency of conventional bulbs generates heat which supplements other forms of heating in winter.
    Which begs the question: is it really worth it?
    Politicians are forcing a change to a particular technology which is fine for some applications but not universally liked, and which has disadvantages.
    The problem is that legislators are unable to tackle the big issues of energy use effectively, so go for the soft target of a high profile domestic use of energy... ..This is gesture politics."
    Cambridge University Science Network on the EU ban, similarly for USA etc given the references, and no doubt similar NZ and elsewhere too.
    - but that is far from all...

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  14. (continued) 2. The Actual energy/emission saving of switching light bulbs


    Power plant factors:
    Most incandescent type lighting is used off-peak after 7pm (UK DEFRA data but likely similar NZ), when power plants are not used to their capacity anyway.Particularly Coal, the base loading types that are hardly turned down at night = effectively SAME coal SAME emissions regardless of bulbs chosen or even bulbs being on or off
    Now, attempts are made to cycle coal plants (turn down at night):Newer plants better at that, but they also have less emissions:And they are still subject to the litany of problematic and costly issues of reducing output, as APTECH referenced - so essentially the above still stands, for much of the targeted light bulb usage.
    Of course the assumption is also that coal is the source in the first place:Ban -Happy Governments love to talk about massive future savings from bulb ban crafted to some future year, the next minute talking about all the emssion reduction they are going to put through before that anyway!!There is only one word applicable to all of this: Idiocy.

    That is not to say that avoiding energy waste/emissions is not good - certainly - but is applied to 30-35% efficient coal plants, to generation as a whole, to grid upgrades, to smart grids smoothing consumption, to real consumption waste (leaving products on = waste, personal choice = not waste),to targeting more wasteful heating, cooling consumption, etc etc
    Tonn.ie/p/deception-behind-banning-light-bulbs.html"The Deception behind the Arguments used to ban Light Bulbs and other Products"
    Political clowns waving funny bulbs around and quoting massive figures swallowed whole by the ever-gullible media have nothing to do with actually solving anything.

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  15. see below.. this does not get posted if linking comments
    2. The Actual energy/emission saving of switching light bulbs


    As you say, there is a documented heat replacement effect.
    But the NZ ban was put off for other reasons, including the effect on NZ grids of replacing fluorescent bulbs, given their higher power factor (not same as power rating!) Effectively a greater energy waste from fluorescents than supposed.
    The NZ research also linked
    see Ceolas.net (not get posted if I give the full link)
    Of course consumers have to pay for this eventually. Also many other reasons why switchover energy savings less (manufacture, transport, recycling of more complex bulbs less easily locally made, etc)


    Keeping the correct Focus:
    What is important for Society is not a Big Brother concern of what Johnny saves in switching his bedroom bulb, but what Society saves from a Society law.
    And the savings are negligible....
    "The total reduction in energy use would be 0.54 x 0.8 x 0.76% = 0.33%,
    This figure is almost certainly an overestimate,
    particularly as the inefficiency of conventional bulbs generates heat which supplements other forms of heating in winter.
    Which begs the question: is it really worth it?
    Politicians are forcing a change to a particular technology which is fine for some applications but not universally liked, and which has disadvantages.
    The problem is that legislators are unable to tackle the big issues of energy use effectively, so go for the soft target of a high profile domestic use of energy... ..This is gesture politics."
    Cambridge University Science Network on the EU ban, similarly for USA etc given the references, and no doubt similar NZ and elsewhere too.

    ReplyDelete
  16. excuse separation this does not get posted if long or linked comments

    2. The Actual energy/emission saving of switching light bulbs


    Keeping the correct Focus:
    The savings for individuals are less for many reasons, that won't take up here.What is important for Society is in any case not a Big Brother concern of what Johnny saves in switching his bedroom bulb, but what Society saves from a Society law, assuming - as covered - such measures are appropriate in the first place.
    And the savings are negligible....see other comment links for source references."The total reduction in energy use would be 0.54 x 0.8 x 0.76% = 0.33%, This figure is almost certainly an overestimate, particularly as the inefficiency of conventional bulbs generates heat which supplements other forms of heating in winter.Which begs the question: is it really worth it? Politicians are forcing a change to a particular technology which is fine for some applications but not universally liked, and which has disadvantages.The problem is that legislators are unable to tackle the big issues of energy use effectively, so go for the soft target of a high profile domestic use of energy... ..This is gesture politics."Cambridge University Science Network on the EU ban, similarly for USA etc given the references, and no doubt similar NZ and elsewhere too.
    - but that is far from all...

    ReplyDelete