“The Promise of a Better Light Bulb?” by Leora Broydo Vestel discusses a company out of Seattle, Washington that is developing a new light bulb technology. With regular incandescent bulbs in the United States being phased out, the market for energy efficient lighting technologies is at an all time high. Vu1, pronounced view one, believes that their new light bulbs will have a significant advantage over compact fluorescent lights (C.F.L.’s), and LED bulbs.
The Vu1 technology will be employed into recessed lighting bulbs by the end of this year with the advantages of being; mercury free, fully dimmable, and having a lifespan of roughly 6,000 hours. The one drawback to consumers may be its cost, ranging from 18 to 22 dollars. Vu1 bulb technology shares the same science as cathode ray tubes in older televisions. Electrons are sprayed over an area inside the light bulb creating light. Therefore, it requires no filament, plasma, coils, or mercury vapor. Although this bulb will only be for recessed lighting by the end of this year, the market for recessed lighting is huge. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that there are over 500 million recessed lights in residential areas and more than 20 million bulbs are sold every year.
Personally, I feel as though this is a promising new technology but I am not sure it is the answer to energy efficiency just yet. One reason why I feel this way is because of the cost of the bulb. A major problem that has happened with C.F.L. technology stems from its initial cost. C.F.L.’s used to be relatively expensive to the consumer so there was a pressure to lower the cost. This lowering of the cost however came at the expense of the bulb. C.F.L. bulbs have a much lower quality than they did when they first came out. If this Vu1 technology is expensive, then there is a chance for this problem to repeat. Another issue that may arise can again be linked to what has been seen with C.F.L. bulbs. C.F.L.’s are by definition, more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs. For this reason, there has been an unintended trend with consumers. Since people think they are saving money using these bulbs, they actually leave the lights on for much longer periods of time thus actually using more energy. Without knowing the actual energy input needed for the Vu1 technology other than knowing that they are energy efficient, what is to say that consumers won’t overuse these bulbs as well? In summary, I believe that the Vu1 bulbs have many advantages environmentally over other energy efficient bulbs; however there are still some questions that may limit its success in the long term.
--Evan Carrozza