At Ikea, Lights Out for Incandescents

Attention, Ikea shoppers: if you can’t imagine life without the warm glow of incandescent light bulbs, the time to stock up is now. On Aug. 1, the Swedish retailer will begin phasing out the bulbs in its North American stores, with the intention of eliminating them entirely by Jan. 1, 2011. The move comes ahead of new federal energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs that will make many incandescent bulbs obsolete.

“When you walk into the store on Jan. 1, you will not see one incandescent light bulb,” said Mona Astra Liss, an Ikea spokeswoman. “We took the lead with the phase-out of plastic bags two years ago, and this is another initiative to make a difference.”

For those looking to recreate the warmth of incandescent light, Ms. Liss suggested LED’s or halogen bulbs (left); this fall, Ikea plans to introduce a halogen bulb that fits in a standard light socket. Information: ikea.com. 

Energy Department Lags in Saving Energy

Like flossing or losing weight, saving energy is easier to promise than to actually do — even if you are the Department of Energy.

Its Web site advises that choosing new lighting technologies can slash energy use by 50 to 75 percent. But the department is having trouble taking its own advice, according to an internal audit released on Wednesday; many of its offices are still installing obsolete fluorescent bulbs.

And very few have switched to the most promising technology, light-emitting diodes, which the department spent millions of dollars to help commercialize.

Many of the changes would generate savings that would pay back the investment in two years or so, according to the report, by the department’s inspector general.

In one case, the Department of Energy made most of the investment by installing timers to shut off lights at night when it moved into a new building in 1997. But it got no benefit: as of March of this year, it had not bought the central control unit needed to run the system.

“We are requesting people in the federal sector and the private sector to do the cost-benefit analysis and make the investment,” Gregory H. Friedman, the inspector general, said in a telephone interview. “We should do it ourselves.”

Asked about the report, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, Stephanie Mueller, said, “We can acknowledge there’s more work that needs to be done.”

The problem is not ignorance, the report suggests. For example, the department helped develop a technology called spectrally enhanced lighting that gives off light at wavelengths that mimic the sun. Officials at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago told the auditors that that they could reduce energy consumption by 50 percent by switching to the new technology from old fluorescents.

But of seven sites, with 96 buildings in all, that the auditors visited, only two used the enhanced lighting. In many cases buildings were using fluorescents introduced 40 years ago.

Energy Department offices gave a variety of explanations for why they were unable to update their lighting. Some said the lights were in high-security areas. And in some cases, the lighting that needs replacing is on very high ceilings and hard to get to, auditors were told.

In February 2008, the department adopted a new policy for taking its savings from energy conservation and reinvesting them in new conservation measures. But the auditors found that “there was no departmentwide system in place to track or calculate reinvestments of energy savings.”

Of the seven sites visited, only one had a system in place for even identifying the savings, the auditors said.

Nationally, the department has 9,000 buildings and a huge electric bill, $190 million a year, of which about $76 million goes to lighting, the report said. The auditors said more efficient lighting would save American taxpayers $2.2 million a year and free up enough electricity to meet the needs of 3,200 homes.

Ms. Mueller said the department’s headquarters, the Forrestal Building, which sits a few blocks west of the Capitol and near the Smithsonian’s “castle” building, would soon become a showcase for lighting innovation.

Its 600 outdoor lights will be replaced with light-emitting diodes, she said, saving 475 megawatt-hours a year. A typical house uses about 12 megawatt-hours a year.

Let There Be Dimmers on Our Glowing Planet

SEEING CLEARLY Thomas Edison, third from right, in his lab in Menlo Park, N.J. City lights came to define the very idea of urbanity, Jane Brox writes.

America roared into the electric age and didn’t stop to consider what it had wrought until just short of the 100th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb.

That’s what Jane Brox, author of “Brilliant,” argues, and she dates that realization not to the 1965 blackout that closed down most of the northeast but to President Nixon’s dictum in the wake of the 1973 energy crisis that all nonessential lighting — holiday lights, advertising, the lights of Broadway — be dimmed. “Something essential had been taken away,” she writes, “something larger than sheer illumination: the assumption that we could live without thinking about energy, that we could take it all for granted.”

Humans have been lighting their environment with hearths and torches for half a million years but the lamps date from no more than 40,000 years ago. Some of the earliest were found in the prehistoric caves of Lascaux, in France. The complex and lyrically beautiful paintings, dating from 18,000 years ago, were created by the light of tallow cupped in limestone.

The painters saw only a small fragment at a time of the huge and complicated panorama, which spreads over numerous chambers of the cave and uses the contours of the rock to create the illusion of movement. Lascaux serves as the subject for both prologue and epilogue to her book. The light at Lascaux was “as it would be for ages to come: light, its limits, and then the dark.”

Ms. Brox’s narrative is in many ways a social history, told through man’s relationship to light. In the Middle Ages cities were dark at night, residents locked into their houses. The term “curfew” dates from this period (couvre le feu), for the moment the lights were doused the streets became too dangerous to navigate.

By the 1700s cities were sporadically lit with whale oil lamps, kept alive by lamplighters. They tended to extinguish easily. Most were out by 9:00 or 10:00. Linkboys, bearing links, or torches, took over, hiring themselves out to pedestrians and lighting their way home. Eventually city lights came to define the very idea of urbanity, she writes. The countryside remained mostly in darkness until the Roosevelt era, when the hydroelectric projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority finally made possible the spread of electricity to rural areas.

Indoors, gaslight replaced candles or oil lamps beginning in the 1820s. Interiors were suddenly much, much brighter, but the introduction of gaslight brought with it a psychological shift.

“Gaslight divided light — and life — from its singular, self-reliant past. All was now interconnected, contingent, and intricate.” Gaslight, Ms. Brox writes, prefigured “our nets of voices, signs, and pulses, with power subject to flickers and loss we can’t do anything about.” The later chapters of “Brilliant” delve into the technology of light. Fluorescence, cold light, introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair , depends on a complicated sequence of events, which she describes clearly and concisely. The end stage involves the interaction of mercury vapor and the phosphor-coated tube containing it.

When the two interact, the result is ultraviolet light, invisible to the human eye. But the phosphor itself glows in the presence of ultraviolet light, and creates that light that we all have spent hours working or studying under. The fluorescent tube uses a quarter of the energy of the incandescent bulb and emits a quarter of the heat.

She also vividly describes the mutual dependence of the many small power stations that make up the electrical grid. A delicate balance has to be maintained — for surges, flow reversals or disruptions at one plant can affect the whole system.

“You might think of their working sound as the music of our spheres, for if even one were to fall out of phase and begin spinning at its own speed, if its steady precise humming became discordant — a wobbly song of its own, well, then...” Blackout. The breakdown occurs almost instantaneously. Repairing it, as anyone who’s been caught in one knows, can take days.

Alas, Ms. Brox seems to join a backlash against compact fluorescents, those curly bulbs we’re encouraged and soon will be mandated to use (Beginning in January 2012, federal law will require that light bulbs will need to be 30 percent more efficient than current incandescent bulbs). They are far more energy efficient than incandescent light bulbs, but she, like others, is nostalgic for old-fashioned bulbs. They “still shed a more satisfactory light than anything yet developed to replace them.”

I disagree. Sure, they come on slowly, but the gradual brightening is nuanced, soft, and the light they cast is a gentler glow than the incandescent bulb. They have their problems (cleaning up a broken compact fluorescent can be hazardous, because of the mercury) but to me they hark back to the days of gaslight, the soft glow a reprieve from the brilliance that surrounds most of our days and much of our nights.

Though she balks at compact fluorescents, she is passionate about the need to control the ever increasing brightness of the developed world.

“It’s not too much to imagine a night with room for more than mere brilliance will allow: the flowering of cockleburs and the warmth of cafes in evening; the safe passage of loggerhead turtles and skyscrapers figured anew; the stars above more brilliant ... and our own long-storied selves intimately at home in immensity.”

We need to bring our need for light into harmony with the needs of those who share the earth with us.

Up From Darkness

One dark and electrically stormy night, the lights blinked out in our rented Maine cabin. Lacking candles or a flashlight, my mother knew just what to do: she poured the hamburger grease from a frying pan into a teacup, then tore a few dangling strands of cotton from the open knee of my bell-bottom jeans. She set the wick in the fat and struck a match. A teenager at the time, I’d never been quite so impressed with parental competence.

The lights eventually came back on, and I forgot about the burger lamp until reading Jane Brox’s “Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light,” which takes us from fat to fluorescence and on into the future (beyond the bulb, that is). The book starts off promisingly, in the dim past. Forty thousand years ago, by the caves of Lascaux, our ancestors made lamps of animal fat puddled in hollowed-out stone. Wicks were twisted lichen or moss. In ­other places at other times, humans lighted their way with corralled fireflies, torches of burning pine knots, or dried salmon on a stick. When Shetland Islanders needed a lamp, Brox writes, “they’d affix a petrel carcass to a base of clay, thread a wick down its throat, and set it alight.” These early flames were not brilliant; they smoked, gave off foul odors and required constant tending. No wonder folks went to bed as soon as their work was done. Millenniums passed. Improvements — in wicks, vessels, fuels and ways to ignite them — came slowly, though somewhat less so for some: “The wealthy and powerful have always been the first to acquire new kinds of light and have always had more of it than others,” Brox writes.

In the Middle Ages, the rich (and the Roman Catholic Church) were enjoying the clear and steady flames of beeswax candles, while the rest of the world still squinted into the grimy light of whatever adipose matter lay at hand, whether rendered from manatees, alligators, whales, sheep, oxen, bison, deer or coconuts. In lean times, the poor could face a difficult choice: eat those candles or burn them.

Brox follows light from the home and workshop into the streets, tracking the expansion of public lighting and the steady diminution of darkness. Shadows provided privacy in cramped quarters, but darkness threatened public safety (or so thought some; others believed light aided robbers and footpads). In the Middle Ages, expanding cities employed lantern-bearing night watchmen, erected gates and enforced curfews (much as we do during blackouts today). By the late 1600s, some cities began to require that citizens place candles or lamps on street-facing windowsills. (Yes, Brox’s take throughout is Eurocentric.) Though unsteady and faint, such lights served to lengthen the day, offering time “maybe for work, maybe for the counterlife that the night always offered: a chance for pleasure and the risk of transgression.”

Ruminative and curious, Brox excels at discussing the cultural and psychological changes wrought by more and better light, from the self-reliance of lanterns to our eventual dependence on coal-gas and then electric utilities. Who had light and who did not? What did different types of people do with their newfound hours? How did street lighting change public behavior? (Once drinkers could move safely between taverns, instead of perching on a single tavern stool all night, Brox writes, the streets became far rowdier; prostitutes previously confined to brothels could now sell their wares al fresco.)

With increased mobility and safety, those who could afford lighting stayed up later. Sleeping in became a mark of prestige. Meanwhile, those who lived near the gasworks — never located in a city’s high-rent district — endured foul-smelling and dangerous emissions. A new form of environmental injustice was born.

As urban lighting improved, the demarcation between city dwellers and country dwellers — still tethered to the rhythm of sun and moon — also grew starker. Eventually, Brox writes, “the illuminated city and the glamour and liveliness of its night came to define almost completely what it meant to be urban and urbane.” (With the advent of brightly lighted streets, in the mid-19th century, came the minting of a new word: “nightlife.”)

Electricity did bring good things: more security, more commerce, more “progress.” An electric light bulb was self-­starting, self-maintaining, cheap, efficient, clean and safe. It “would not spontaneously ignite cloth dust in factories or hay in the mow. A child could be left alone with it.”

But this new light would also generate a new kind of isolation for unelectrified rural populations, who knew exactly what they were missing, especially after rural free delivery began distributing catalogs and magazines depicting electric irons, washers and lamps. It turns out that living without an electrical hookup wasn’t so bad when electrical hookups didn’t exist. But being deprived of power while others reveled in it left many rural dwellers feeling beyond resentful.

Brox delves with vigor into Franklin Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, whose hydroelectric plants were meant to alleviate the effects of the Depression with jobs and raise standards of living for the rural poor. Roosevelt saw electricity not only as away to modernize people’s lives, Brox writes, but also as “a moral force capable of improving their sense of citizenship and strengthening ties within the community.” Rural electrification, Jimmy Carter wrote, “made it possible for us to stretch our hearts and stretch our minds to encompass public involvement in affairs that would not have been possible” otherwise. And so we see how engineers brought us power, while the availability of power engineered a better society.

And yet: better for whom? “Brilliant” closes with an appeal for considerably less light in the developed world (while acknowledging the need for more light in developing nations). Let’s do with slightly less illumination, Brox argues, for the sake of animals mortally confused by sky glow, astronomers who can no longer see portions of the night sky, and human thoughtfulness itself. A “new night carved out of abundance might also be a time of great possibilities,” she writes, “when we might ask in our way, as Cyril of Jerusalem once did, ‘What [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?’ ”

Brox, an essayist who has written about the rural life, is at her best exploring the evolution of light as a shaper of human psychology. But she gives some technical explanations short shrift, moving swiftly from flaming salmon to spermaceti, from Ben Franklin to Alessandro Volta, from sad-irons to electric sweepers. But once electrification becomes widespread, I found my interest dimming, possibly because this recent material is more familiar. Distance lends enchantment. As Brox approaches the present, she sometimes gets caught in eddies — swirling a bit too long around topics like the political structure of rural cooperatives and deregulation in the energy industry. As Brox herself might agree, it’s possible at times to shine too much light.

These cavils aside, “Brilliant” is an intriguing investigation of a state of being — well lighted — that we take utterly for granted. Until the grid goes down, that is, and we’re back to reading by hamburger glow.

The Light Bulb as Art Form

In his paintings and limited-edition toys, Brian Donnelly, a Brooklyn-based artist who goes by the name of KAWS, frequently riffs on cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the Simpsons, crossing out their eyes with X’s. For his latest project, Mr. Donnelly set his sights on a more utilitarian target: the incandescent bulb.

“Just changing a small thing, like a filament, can turn a light bulb from a standard everyday thing to something you want to look at,” Mr. Donnelly said. “You’re raised not to stare at light bulbs, but this is the opposite of that.”

Mr. Donnelly said he considered many different forms for the filament while designing the light bulbs for the Standard Hotel chain, but ultimately decided on a pair of his trademark X’s because “it’s a signature, but also works with the round shape” of the glass. The dimly glowing three-watt bulbs are available in a limited-edition set of three (red, purple and green) for $65 at Standard Hotel retail shops and online. Information: (212) 784-5520,

BUY HERE

Let There Be More Efficient Light

Jesse Lenz

LAST week Michele Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, introduced a bill to roll back efficiency standards for light bulbs, which include a phasing out of incandescent bulbs in favor of more energy-efficient bulbs. The “government has no business telling an individual what kind of light bulb to buy,” she declared.

Opponents of the new standards, to be in place by 2014, draw on the odd-couple coalition of Tea Party Republicans and organized labor. They have positioned themselves as defenders of American tradition in the face of big government: another Republican representative, Joe Barton of Texas, waxed lyrically with two colleagues about “the incandescent bulb that has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.”

But this opposition ignores another, more important bit of American history: the critical role that government-mandated standards have played in scientific and industrial innovation.

Republicans are right, of course, to praise inventors like Edison for their pioneering advancements at the close of the 19th century. But inventions alone weren’t enough to guarantee progress.

Indeed, at the time the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.

This wasn’t the case everywhere. Germany’s standards agency, established in 1887, was busy setting rules for everything from the content of dyes to the process for making porcelain; other European countries soon followed suit. Higher-quality products, in turn, helped the growth in Germany’s trade exceed that of the United States in the 1890s.

America finally got its act together in 1894, when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics. And, in 1901, the United States became the last major economic power to establish an agency to set technological standards.

The result was a boom in product innovation in all aspects of life during the 20th century. Today we can go to our hardware store and choose from hundreds of light bulbs that all conform to government-mandated quality and performance standards.

Technological standards not only promote innovation — they also can help protect one country’s industries from falling behind those of other countries. Today China, India and other rapidly growing nations are adopting standards that speed the deployment of new technologies. Without similar requirements to manufacture more technologically advanced products, American companies risk seeing the overseas markets for their products shrink while innovative goods from other countries flood the domestic market.

To prevent that from happening, America needs not only to continue developing standards, but also to devise a strategy to apply them consistently and quickly.

The best approach would be to borrow from Japan, whose Top Runner program sets energy-efficiency standards by identifying technological leaders in a particular industry — say, washing machines — and mandating that the rest of the industry keep up. As technologies improve, the standards change as well, enabling a virtuous cycle of improvement.

At the same time, the government should work with businesses to devise multidimensional standards, so that consumers don’t balk at products because they sacrifice, say, brightness and cost for energy efficiency.

This is not to say that innovation doesn’t bring disruption, and American policymakers can’t ignore the jobs that are lost when government standards sweep older technologies into the dustbin of history.

An effective way forward on light bulbs, then, would be to apply standards only to those manufacturers that produce or import in large volume. Meanwhile, smaller, legacy light-bulb producers could remain, cushioning the blow to workers and meeting consumer demand.

Technologies and the standards that guide their deployment have revolutionized American society. They’ve been so successful, in fact, that the role of government has become invisible — so much so that even members of Congress should be excused for believing the government has no business mandating your choice of light bulbs.

Roger A. Pielke Jr. is a professor at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder.