Energy Costs Give Green Light to Green Stages

In the movie The Graduate, a family friend offered Benjamin Braddock some career advice at his graduation party.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word; plastics.”

If that film were made today instead of in 1967, the “word” might have been “fuel surcharge.” Okay, that’s two words, but they’re two very interesting words. The electric company uses those words as a way of saying, “There’s been a price increase, but it’s not our fault!”

Get used to seeing it.

The fuel surcharge is the handwriting on the wall. According to Lieutenant Colonel John M. Amidon, USAF, in his article America’s Strategic Imperative: A “Manhattan Project” for Energy (published August 31, 2005 by Joint Forces Quarterly), a dwindling supply of non-renewable fossil fuels, increasingly difficult access to oil (much of the world’s oil supply comes from politically volatile parts of the world like the Middle East), and a steadily rising demand all add up to trouble for energy consumers.

But with that trouble also comes opportunity for those who can help save energy.

The War on Inefficient Lighting
Pop quiz: Who uttered these words?

“It cannot be denied that the present methods [of illumination]…are very wasteful. Some better methods must be invented, some more perfect apparatus devised.”

Was it:

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger
2. Paris Hilton
3. California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine
4. Nikola Tesla
5. Sponge Bob Square Pants

Hint: It wasn’t California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, who introduced legislation in his state to set minimum standards for the efficacy of general service lamps such as the standard light bulb used in the typical home.

It was, in fact, Nikola Tesla, who, in 1891, presented a lecture before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at the electrical workshop of Columbia College in New York. Tesla was among the first to recognize that Edison’s “perfected” lamp was not so perfect. In fact, it wastes much more energy than not.

Nevertheless, it is Edison’s design that has served for almost 120 years as the light bulb that your grandparents, your parents, and you know as the one you buy when you need to replace one in your house. But that may be changing soon, courtesy of your beloved state politicians.

Ironically, the first salvos in the war on inefficient lighting came not from the industrialized first world but from the communist world. According to an article by Frances Robles of the Miami Herald, Cuba’s Fidel Castro banned the importation and sales of incandescent bulbs in August 2005 and the Ministry of Basic Industries replaced from 400,000 to 1.2 million incandescent bulbs just in Havana. A year later, Castro sent between 157,000 to 330,000 compact fluorescent lamps to Belize along with 12 Cuban volunteers to help 50 Belizeans go house-to-house exchanging the CFLs for incandescents. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, also introduced a bulb ban of his own after his comrade in Cuba did it first.

It wasn’t until three months later, on January 30, that Lloyd Levine announced his intention to introduce his legislation in California. Within three months afterward, similar proposals were initiated in Connecticut, San Francisco, New Jersey, Australia, the European Union, and Canada.

Castro’s motivation for turning on CFLs in the third world is clearly more practical than the altruistic aims of the more industrialized countries. The island’s 3,200 megawatts of electrical generation is running at 50% capacity after having been crippled by hurricanes and having lost the supply of cheap oil from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The resulting shortage has caused blackouts, much tension, and even protests where rocks where thrown at government buildings. Increasing the efficiency of household lighting is a quick and relatively inexpensive way of addressing their electricity supply problems.

Outside of the communist and socialist countries, law-makers have additional reasons for legislating inefficient lighting out of existence. The ever growing chorus of the strains of global warming from environmental lobbyists and activists are seen as a plum voting block for the savvy politician. Some might even be concerned about the environment. But is there really reason to be concerned with lighting efficiency? Just how inefficient is the typical lamp and how much impact does it have on the environment?

The Science of Inefficiency
The original proposal introduced by Assembly Member Levine specifically aimed to outlaw the “general service incandescent lamp” with good reason; the typical 100-watt household incandescent lamp takes about a dollar’s worth of electricity to produce less than a nickel’s worth of light. The rest, about 97.4%, is radiated as infrared or pure heat, completely invisible to the oblivious human eye.

Its overall luminous efficacy – the visible light output compared to the amount of power it takes – is about 17.5 lumens per watt compared to about 45 to 60 lumens per watt for a compact fluorescent lamp. It’s this low efficiency that the politicians are targeting. But because they’re politicians and not engineers, most of the original legislation targeted the existing technology rather than the inefficiency, which is the real culprit. What happens if the next Thomas A. Edison comes up with new technology to drastically increase the efficiency of the incandescent lamp?

In fact, General Electric hopes to do just that with the new high efficiency incandescent lamp, or the HEI, which increases the overall luminous efficacy to 30 lumens per watt, almost double the conventional rate. And GE believes it can eventually reach efficiencies of 60 lumens per watt.

Many of the lawmakers have reworded their legislation to set minimum standards for the overall luminous efficacy of general service lamps. In the case of Levine’s California Assembly Bill 722, the bill outlaws the sale of general service lamps with less than 50 lumens per watt starting in 2010. But will this legislation have the desired effect on the environment? And what is the desired effect?

Acid Rain on the Parade
It turns out that about half of the world’s power plants are coal-fired, and they are the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet. Some scientists believe that CO2 emission is the primary cause of global warming. Burning coal also releases other pollutants into the air. In addition to CO2, coal combustion byproducts include sulfur and many heavy metals like arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, radium, selenium, vanadium, and zinc. The sulfur reacts with oxygen and water to produce sulfuric acid, which falls back to earth as acid rain, and the mercury released into the atmosphere is the single largest unregulated source of mercury.

The light bulb legislation is targeting these pollutants in an effort to reduce them enough to make a significant impact. To power a 100-watt incandescent lamp from a coal-fired power plant an average of three hours per night every day for a year, which is approximately 1000 hours, it takes about 110 pounds of coal and produces about 200 pounds of CO2. If, instead, we replaced that 100-watt lamp with a 24-watt CFL with an overall luminous efficacy of 50 lumens per watt, it would take about 26 pounds of coal to operate and it would produce about 48 pounds of CO2, a savings of about 84 pounds of coal and 152 pounds of CO2. In Cuba, where they replaced about a million incandescent lamps with CFLs, they might be saving as much as 42 thousand short tons of coal and 76 thousand tons of CO2 emissions every year. And according to a press release from GE, if the entire installed base of conventional incandescent lamps is replaced with HEIs, it could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US by 40 million tons and in the EU by up to 50 million tons of CO2 per year. Australia’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 4 million tons per year by 2012.

But wait, there’s more…
In a closed system like a building or a room, all of the heat generated by a lamp has to be removed by the air conditioning system if the temperature is to remain the same. Doing so requires the use of even more electricity.

For example, a 100-watt lamp throws off 341 British thermal units (BTUs) for each hour of use, which increases the heat load by the same. The impact of that heat and the amount of air conditioning needed to remove it depends on the efficiency of the air conditioner. An air conditioner with a seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) of 7.5 will use 34.1 watt-hours of energy to remove that heat. In effect, it increases the energy consumption of this lamp by 34%, adding to the cost, CO2 emissions, and pollution.

The coal and fossil fuels we use to power many of our electric generators are from a finite supply. It has been estimated by British Petroleum in 2006 that there was approximately 155 years of reserve to production ratio for coal. By increasing the efficiency of lighting, the hope is that we can buy more time to find safe and practical alternative energy.

CFL is Blasphemy
But even the most pro-green among us has to wonder about the impact all this will have on theatrical lighting. To many of us, banning incandescent lamps in the theatre, television studio, concert tours, and even corporate events is tantamount to blasphemy. There are far too many problems with alternative lamp sources to even consider them at this point. Fluorescent lamps don’t render color well and they can only dim to 1%. Depending on the ballast, they can only trigger on at about 50% and some of them take a minute or two to reach their full light output. And LEDs present problems of their own; they render color altogether differently than incandescent lamps, they lack an organic feel when they dim, and they aren’t quite punchy enough yet to produce the light levels we’re used to.

Fortunately, the politicians seem to recognize that alternative lamp sources aren’t for everybody. Levine’s proposal limits the legislation to general service lamps with a medium screw base with a wattage rating between 25 and 150 watts, which pretty much excludes the majority of lamps in the entertainment lighting industry. The Australian plan is to similarly draw up minimum efficiency standards as well, with specific exceptions to PAR lamps. Andy Ciddor, the president of the Australian Lighting Industry Association (ALIA) has volunteered to help create the standard with the intention of monitoring the legislation and its implications in the entertainment lighting industry.

What’s a Lighting Designer to Do?
If CFL is not green salvation and LEDs are not the universal answer, what then?

There are many ways in which to increase the efficiency of the installed base of theatrical and architectural lighting. The answer depends on the circumstances; it might be T5 fluorescents, daylighting, ETC Source Four ERS, LEDs or a combination thereof. In many situations the building owner has benefited from a redesign and often the savings pay for the upgrade.

Side Bar

A church in Houston was originally built in the early 1970s and the lighting was upgraded in the mid-1980s. It had three stained glass windows that were backlit with 190 1000-watt cyc lights and there were 168 1000-watt PARs used for the house lights. By replacing cyc lights with 109 324-watt T5 fluourescent fixtures and the house lights with 575-watt ERS fixtures, the energy consumption was cut by 55%. In addition, the lower power consumption results in a lower air conditioning load, saving even more energy and money. With a conservative estimate of 20 hours per week of use, an electrical cost of $0.0986 per kilowatt-hour, and a SEER of 10, in a year’s time, the building owner will save about $28,600.

Before:

Total energy consumed: 392,080 kW-hours

Total thermal load: 1,286,377 BTUs

Annual cost of electricity for A/C: $13,191

Annual cost of electricity for lights: $38,659

 

After:

Total energy consumed: 175,848 kW-hours

Total thermal load: 576,942 BTUs

Annual cost of electricity for A/C: $7,275

Annual cost of electricity for lights: $21,320

Total Annual Savings: $28,595

Amount of coal saved annually: 119 tons

Amount of carbon dioxide saved annually: 218 tons

Coal-burning power plants also release arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, molybdenum, radium, selenium, vanadium, and zinc into the atmosphere. Saving energy not only saves money, it also makes good environmental sense.