| Independently Powered Energy News

My car’s beige naugahyde dashboard looks the same as it has for more than ten years. Through its light emitting diodes, the displays tell me the temperature, miles/hour (on cop lookout), and radio station. That durable technology--the lights, not the naugahyde--is soon destined to replace the standard 60-watt light bulb. In car-speak--decelerating from 60 watts to 10 watts. It’s a development that could spell the eventual end of the compact fluorescent light bulb in California utility energy efficiency programs. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Philips North America Lighting its “Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize.” Philips was the first company in the DOE competition launched in 2008 to develop a durable light emitting diode (LED) bulb to replace the standard 60-watt incandescent bulb and use only one-sixth the electricity. The 60-watt incandescent bulb is considered the most widely used light in the nation. Philips’ new 10-watt bulb not only saves energy, but is durable like the LEDs in your car dashboard that burn uninterrupted for years. DOE tests show Philips’ bulb lasts at least 25,000 hours compared to the 1,000 to 3,000 hours of service the typical incandescent bulb provides. Under the terms of the contest, the bulb is to provide lighting quality equivalent to the familiar incandescent bulb, plus have the same screw-in base allowing it to be used in existing lamps and lighting fixtures. Philips is to make 250,000 bulbs for $22 apiece in its first year of production and drive the cost down to $8/bulb by the third year. Announcing the award--commonly called the “L Prize”--in the nation’s capital August 3, secretary of energy Steve Chu stated that Philips’ product would spur other lighting companies to move into LED bulbs. He called the bulb a technological leap “that can greatly reduce the money we spend to light our homes and businesses each year.” Philips Lighting North America chief executive officer Zia Eftekhar noted that the bulb provides “an energy efficient alternative to a product that has remained largely unchanged for over a century,” In California, Pacific Gas & Electric, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison are partners in the DOE L Prize program. The utilities are pledging to support collaborative marketing and promotional activities and develop an incentive program for the bulb that’s consistent with criteria for energy efficiency incentive programs and California Public Utilities Commission regulatory requirements. Philips entered DOE’s L Prize in 2009. Its LED bulb successfully completed 18 months of intensive testing aimed at ensuring performance, quality, lifetime, cost, and availability in order to meet expectations for widespread adoption and mass manufacturing. DOE estimates that if every 60-watt incandescent bulb in the nation was replaced with the 10-watt bulb, utility customers would save about 35 TWh of electricity, cut their annual electricity bills by $3.9 billion, and avoid 20 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

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