RIP Incandescent Light Bulbs?
People do strange things around Halloween. I swear – I usually do not walk into our house with 8 pounds of store-bought candy (Butterfingers and Heath Bars, of course). A couple days before Halloween, as I fumble around looking for our fake tombstones, I do something else unusual – I turn on the light in our basement.
If light bulbs were power plants, the bulb in our basement would be a peaker – used very rarely but providing high value when called on. In addition to its 10 minutes of use around Halloween, it gets another 10 minutes before Christmas as I run down to the basement to grab the tree stand while my kids and husband wait patiently with that year’s tree choice/victim on top of the car. Probably because it’s used so rarely, the bulb hasn’t burned out yet, so it’s one of the few incandescent light bulbs remaining in our house.
Seeing our trusty basement bulb reminded me of the news stories from a couple years ago about banning incandescent light bulbs. It made me wonder – are those bans really in effect? Should I preserve our basement specimen as some kind of energy-themed artifact?
The answer is not as straightforward as I anticipated. I started by doing a little empirical research and typed “incandescent light bulb” into Amazon’s search box. Lots of choices, and they’re still dirt cheap. So, no Antique Roadshow for our basement bulb – I can replace it for less than $1 online.
But, then what of all the news articles about the ban? Here’s where it gets interesting. In theory, the ban is in effect. In a nutshell, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which was signed by George W. Bush, set out a schedule that called for progressively tighter efficiency standards for light bulbs. Phase 1 called for slightly more efficient bulbs, which required about a 25 percent efficiency improvement for incandescent bulbs. It was phased in by bulb size, starting with 100-Watt bulbs in January 2012. For now, you can still buy a “halogen incandescent,” which I think surrounds the filament with a halogen gas instead of a vacuum. Phase 2, which is coming in 2020 (2018 for California), sets aggressive minimum lumens per watts, which is expected to outlaw all incandescents.
So – and this is not a completely rhetorical question – how is Amazon selling normal 100-Watt incandescent bulbs? I confirmed that I could in fact order them (Prime, even) and 4 are headed to my house today. My reading of the legalese is that it’s against the law to manufacture or sell these in the U.S., though not illegal to buy them. The law allowed 
sellers to get rid of their existing stock, but the ban on 100-Watts has been in effect for almost 4 years, so it seems unlikely that Amazon’s sellers are still depleting their stock.
While there are a number of loopholes for the incandescent ban (e.g., for bug lamps or decorative bulbs), I don’t think the bulbs for sale on Amazon’s site fall into any of them. And, as a contact at the California Energy Commission pointed out, some of the comments on Amazon questioned why the bulbs are marked, “Do Not Sell or Use in the U.S.”
The best answer that I can find is that members of Congress opposed to the ban have prohibited the DOE from spending money to enforce it. So, maybe what Amazon is doing is technically illegal, but won’t be enforced. I should also note that all the examples I’ve seen are “sold by” someone else and “fulfilled by” Amazon. But, I would be unlikely to find these other retailers except through Amazon.
I have two reactions to Amazon’s scheme – one as a citizen of the U.S. and one as an economist. As a citizen of the U.S., I’m disheartened by the idea that we have a recent, bipartisan law on our books that is flagrantly violated. This isn’t some back-alley side deal. This is Amazon – the earth’s biggest retailer.
As an economist, I am also disheartened, but for a slightly more nuanced reason. Economists generally view standards to be poor substitutes for more direct regulations, like pollution taxes. One of the main motivations behind efficiency standards for light bulbs is to reduce the pollution created when electricity is generated to power the light bulbs. But, economists point out that it’s better to just tax the pollution coming out of the power plants. Because it’s such a blunt instrument, the standard is worse than the tax. Consider our basement bulb – it’s on for so few hours that its use emits very little pollution. So, forcing us to spend a couple dollars more to buy an LED – as the 2020 incandescent ban will do – is a waste of society’s resources.
Then again, we’re talking about light bulbs. Most people aren’t paying attention to the economics of their light bulb purchases – even I, as an energy blogger, feel a little sheepish to be calculating the cost-benefits of an LED versus incandescent for our basement. And, people may be making mistakes or lack the information necessary to make the best choice for them. For example, they may wrongly extrapolate from the early, poor-performing CFLs to assume that all non-incandescent bulbs will be low quality.
A recent paper by Hunt Allcott and Dmitry Taubinsky goes through careful reasoning to show that if consumers aren’t paying attention, are making mistakes or lack good information, a light bulb ban, like the one under EISA, can make sense. The paper’s basic empirical results suggest that the ban can’t be justified on those grounds, but I’m willing to extrapolate those findings, as the authors indicate is possible, to suggest it would make sense for today’s LEDs, which are higher quality and more economical than the CFLs that Allcott and Taubinsky evaluate. Given that I think the chances of getting an optimal pollution tax are very low anytime soon, I’m even more comfortable with that extrapolation.
If my guess is correct – that the incandescent ban will be a good thing for society – then I really hope some regulatory agency finds the resources to crack down on Amazon and its sellers. But, this is mostly my speculation, and it would be useful to do more research like Allcott and Taubinsky’s to help quantify the potential impact of the ban. It seems that many members of Congress disagree with me.
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Catherine Wolfram View All
Catherine Wolfram is the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley. Before leaving for government service, she was the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program, Faculty Affiliate of the Energy Institute at Haas from 2000 to 2023, as well as Faculty Director of the Energy Institute from 2009 to 2018. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and restructuring in the US and UK. She is currently working on several projects at the intersection of climate and trade. She received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989.
Energy Institute Blog 
Isn’t Alibaba.com the world’s biggest retailer?
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690596/meet-alibaba-the-ecommerce-giant-with-more-sales-than-amazon-and-ebay
Catherine, possibly you’re unaware of the current trend toward “antique light bulbs” – amazingly inefficient incandescent bulbs, with enormous, ornate filaments. They’re dominating mood lighting in many restaurants and bars, and they’re moving into the home.
They create a warm, desirable glow unmatchable with LEDs. Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to rely on stingy solar panels or burning coal to power them? We don’t, of course. With a few dozen copies of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station around the country, those who can afford them (they aren’t cheap) could enjoy their inviting ambience guilt-free.
https://www.1000bulbs.com/category/antique-light-bulbs/
Hi Catherine. It’s not illegal to sell them in the US. It’s illegal to manufacture them or import them. But whatever stock existed in the US at the time the ban went into effect, that stock can still be sold.
You write with a very nice style, clear and interesting with just the right touch of familiarity. Certainly it’s high time incandescent bulbs are eliminated altogether. How strange that we continue to use them, given the accessibility of LEDs these days. Hopefully the market itself will do the job for us soon, as it did for the telegraph and other antiquated inventions.
Michael Grubb has a very good discussion of how standards (like the ban on incandescent bulbs, or poorly-performing fridges) can help overcome consumer inertia and other barriers to energy efficiency (while pricing carbon is appropriate for decisions that are price-driven, and technology policy (R&D support etc) is needed to transform the options for the energy system) in his book Planetary Economics. Fortunately (given the context), you don’t have to go through Amazon to buy it: https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415518826
Salvator Cosentino
http://darksky.org/light-pollution/human-health/
FYI
Way to blow the whistle on Amazon! Note a few things: 1) the new compliance halogens are, in fact, also “incandescent” (https://www.sylvania.com/en-us/innovation/education/light-and-color/Pages/incandescent-halogen-technology.aspx) and 2) the 100-watt equivalents are pretty darn affordable at this point (just bought this 4 pack at Home Depot over the weekend http://www.homedepot.com/p/Philips-EcoVantage-100-Watt-Incandescent-A19-Long-Life-Light-Bulb-4-Pack-431494/204983943 for $8) and use 72 watts. And, I would agree that the likelihood that a carbon or similar tax is quite unlikely (as are mandatory time differentiated electricity pricing) at the moment, means that a light bulb ban is at least a more feasible alternative. Now, whether forcing people to buy CFLs is a good thing is a much bigger question … here’s hoping ever more affordable LEDs continue to emerge.
How many CFLs does it take to fill up a dump?How many geeks does it take to screw in an LED?
Great last name for a piece on incandescent light bulbs!
There’s something a little eerie about an article on incandescent (tungsten) lamps written by an author named “Wolfram.” Of course, “tungsten” is the Swedish word, and “wolfram” is the English word for this element, symbol W and atomic weight 74.
The alternative to codes and standards she suggests, pricing, only works equally well if all of the preconditions to efficiency under competition are met: consumers and producers have perfect information, goods are perfect substitutes, all societal costs are internalized, there are no barriers to entry, and capital is fungible, among others. Those preconditions are far from present in the electricity marketplace. Thus codes and standards often become the better path to economic efficiency.
One way to move in that direction of economic efficiency with pricing would be to require that all appliances, lamps, and buildings sell with lifetime energy costs embedded into the selling price. For example, if our school districts went to the voters for bonds not only for building construction, but also for life-cycle operating costs of those buildings, they would have an clear incentive to choose the best option.
The problem with this approach is illustrated by the author’s example: a lamp with an annual duty cycle of about 1 hour per year. For that particular lamp, the incremental cost of a high-efficiency lamp may not be justified. But, for 90% of the lamps, using 99% of the electricity, the new standard is really just a form of consumer protection — “making” us buy the product we would CHOOSE TO BUY if we were fully informed. I agree with the author — on balance, a very good regulation.
Since 1992, the only traditional incandescent lamps in my house have been in the fridge, freezer, oven, and microwave where very short duty cycles and harsh operating conditions dictate an atypical approach. Plus the garage door opener (where the high-vibration, 3-minute duty cycle chewed through three CFLs before I gave up and bought a “rough duty” lamp.)
It was a demonstration project (with good press) when we originally did it almost a quarter century ago. Today it’s not just a good idea — it’s the law.