Actually, good-quality LED replacement bulbs were around for several years prior to the ban. They just cost an arm and a leg. The ban didn't force the technology to magically appear -- something that hardly ever happens due to legislation alone -- but it did drive competition and force an economy of scale that would otherwise have been much slower to develop.
So the subsidy backed the wrong horse, and the ban eliminated a useful technology, but it also accidentally supported buildout of LED bulbs, which we could have just accomplished by subsidizing LED tech and not banning incandescents?
Yeah, that seems about par for the course for this kind of regulation. Sometimes a blind cat catches a dead mouse.
Note that the ban didn't prescribe CFLs, it only proscribed incandescents. Yes, it was arguably premature, but it's going to be very hard to convince me that it was the wrong thing to do in retrospect.
It didn't eliminate any technologies, either. I can still buy incandescents if I insist... but why would I?
Oh, it's better than the old one on nearly every way, but the energy consumption is about the same (both are electric heaters, just in different formats) and it's harder to see if it turned on.
Yep, I've heard that story a few times, and haven't heard the contrasting "I needed a 125 watt incandescent for the EZ Bake oven I bought at a garage sale for my daughter, and purchased it, no problem" story, ever.
But that's just anecdote. This being HN, I look forward to the reply which will shortly set me straight on the subject.
Exactly how many anecdotes do you need? Notice that the anecdotes all point the same way, there's no opposite story to average.
Differently from taxes and subsides, prohibiting products is a really impactful action for a government to make, it's not something to be done lightly. And we have had a fashion of really frivolous environment legislation lately doing exactly that kind of thing.
There are still a few places where I use incandescent bulbs. Inside of my oven for example. But I'm totally fine with them being relegated to specialist niches.
A 40 watt oven bulb, yes, but a 125 watt like you'd use in an egg incubator, reptile cage, or EZ Bake?
What prescribed CFLs were heavy subsidies, not the ban. CFLs were being given away by a lot of state governments. It was a nice kickback to importers, but I'd have trouble being convinced it did much for LED manufacturers.
Eh, if I need to heat something, I'll use a heating element that's shaped and specified to do the job required, not something light-bulb shaped that only coincidentally gets hot.
Around here (Washington state), these 65W equivalent LED floods were subsidized to the tune of about $2 or $3 about five years ago: https://www.greenliteusa.com/DATA/DOCUMENTPDF/35_en.pdf At least I assume they're subsidized by the state; I don't see how they could be that cheap otherwise. They weren't giving them away, but I couldn't argue with the price.
I bought a couple dozen, and out of the half-dozen I installed at the time and another half-dozen I've installed since, none have failed. I can tell they aren't incandescent by aiming an IR camera at them, or by watching the phosphor decay after turning them off at night, but that's about it.
Incandescent is a bad technology compared to fluorescent lamps with rare earth phosphors.
Seriously come on, a 100 W Incandescent uses $25 worth of electricity over it's life. Where a fluorescent to LED unit uses $3 over 2000 hours. And lasts 5-10 times longer.
