Boulder City, Nevada, home of the Hoover Dam, is fast becoming an epicenter of utilty-scale solar plants, and is benefiting mightily from it financially.

The city had the foresight to set aside land for solar plants and as a result will rake in lease payments for decades to come. Residents had the same foresight with their near-unanimous support for the projects.

Since they set aside 8000 acres as an "energy zone," it's become home to the nation's largest solar PV plant, the 58 megawatt (MW) Copper Mountain Solar 1, owned by Sempra U.S. Gas & Power.

Online since March 2011, Copper Mountain will add another 92 MW by January 2013, and another 58 MW by 2015 on its 1100 acres. Sempra also has the 10 MW El Dorado Solar plant there.

Acciona's Nevada Solar 1 is there too - a 65 MW concentrating solar plant on 400 acres that's been operating since 2007.

Both companies plan to expand significantly and will be joined by others to eventually cover the entire energy zone. There are plans for about 1400 MW of solar to be built there, supplying energy to 420,000 homes.

Raking in the Cash

Mayor Roger Tobler says the projects could eliminate the city's debt and stabilize its revenue stream far into the future, reports Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Unlike other cities in Nevada, Boulder City has been able to avoid laying off employees and other drastic spending cuts because it will collect about $12 million a year in lease payments from the two projects it's approved thus far.

Besides the lease payments, the city requires solar developers to pay millions of dollars in upfront payments that cover the 2-4 year construction phase.

In total, the city stands to collect over $480 million in rent through the life of the contracts, increasing its annual revenue by almost 50 percent. Leases average 40-50 years.

Sempra also gave Boulder City $500,000 to install any kind of renewable energy on its buildings.

On top of that, the county will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from property taxes, and Boulder City will receive some of that revenue too.

And even on top of that, the solar plants are creating many hundreds of renewable energy jobs.

What attracts so many solar developers there? There's plenty of sunlight, land and access to transmission lines. And they avoid the lengthy, expensive approval process required to build on public land.

Photo by Pardee Ave./flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Tina Casey

“Turbine Cowboys” is a new reality series premiering on The Weather Channel this spring, and anyone with an interest in clean energy should check it out. Despite the highly mechanized nature of wind turbine construction and the use of robotic devices for maintenance, the human element is still very much at work. Turbine Cowboys is an important reminder that while renewable energy is cleaner and safer in terms of emissions and overall public health impacts, that does not necessarily translate into a low-risk work environment.

Wind and Workers

The Turbine Cowboys crew has been filming as far south as Baja California and up north to Alaska, which is a hint about the direction it’s going in. Along with the hazards you’d expect from working around electricity and huge pieces of equipment, and occupying a workspace far above the ground, the workers have to deal with rain and snow, extreme heat and cold, and of course, wind. The show will also cover the “boot camp” training received by turbine workers. As far as green jobs go, it’s hard to imagine one that’s tougher.

In the Words of a Wind Power Worker

The hazards of wind power work are aptly summed up in a posting on the Turbine Cowboys production company Facebook page (typos corrected):

“To say they are not dangerous is ignorant. The amount of safety classes, first aid and rescue training, OSHA certs, ect. is never ending. I work on turbines every day and find new risks every day. I”m constantly reminded of how a simple slip at any point in my day can harm/kill myself or a co-worker.”

Another Turbine Cowboy

“Turbine Cowboy” is a play on the old John Travolta movie Urban Cowboy, so it stands to reason that the same title has come up in the past. Sure enough, somewhere in a record shop bin out there is a 45″ single, “Turbine Cowboy,” written and recorded in 1981 by a graduate of GE’s Field Engineering Program (FEP). The program dates back to 1966 and was initiated to train workers in conventional power generation and industrial equipment work. FEP graduates have some great stories of their own and you can read all about it at their website, turbinecowboy.com (the site is not affiliated with GE, by the way).

Turbine Cowboys: A Celebration of American Labor

As a side note, The Weather Channel Companies is owned by a consortium consisting of NBC Universal, The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. Yes, that Bain Capital. Bain is perceived as an outfit that has made huge profits by eliminating jobs for U.S. workers, so it’s a little ironic that the company is connected (albeit remotely) to a show celebrating the skill, courage and resourcefulness of American labor, but whatevs. Turbine Cowboys is just one part of TWC’s upcoming “Braving the Elements” series on American workers that so far includes high-rise ironworkers and utility emergency repair crews. TWC expects to add more titles throughout the year.

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

by Timothy Hurst

From devastating outbreaks of white nose syndrome to large numbers of bat deaths caused by collision and dramatic changes in air pressure, the health of bat populations has emerged as a major issue for wind farm developers and operators. And while a range of solutions including specialized radar systems and purple wind turbines have been proposed and tested, there has been a gap in research and technology that helps predict the movements of migratory bats.

But now, researchers at the US Forest Service have developed a new technology and predictive tool designed to help wind farm operators reduce impacts on migratory bats while maximizing energy production. The interactive tool, created by ecologist Ted Weller and statistician Jim Baldwin from the USDA Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station, allows users to predict the probability of bat presence ( See a demonstration of the interactive tool at the Wolfram Demonstrations Project website).

In research conducted at Dillon Wind Energy Facility in the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Resource Area in Southern California (pdf), Weller and his team used devices that detected the bats’ echolocation calls, and then linked the presence of bats to the on-site weather conditions.

"Increasing the wind speed at which turbines begin to spin and produce energy to the grid has proven to be an effective way to reduce bat fatalities; however, bat activity levels depend on more than just wind speed," says ecologist Weller. “Our work demonstrates the use of a decision-making tool that could protect bats when fatality risk is highest while maximizing energy production on nights with a low chance of fatalities.”

The researchers also found that multiple, properly-deployed echolocation detectors better characterize bat activity at the facility.

“These days, pre-construction echolocation monitoring is as common as meteorological monitoring at wind energy facilities," Weller explains, "so the basic building blocks for these models are available at most proposed sites.”

Funded by the California Energy Commission Public Interest Energy Research program, the study was a collaborative effort between the USDA, Iberdrola Renewables, and the Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative.

Reprinted with permission from Earth & Industry

The Sierra Club, the largest and oldest environmental group in the U.S., accepted more than $25 million from the natural gas industry from 2007 to 2010 while promoting the fuel as a “bridge” to a clean-energy future, according to a Time magazine report. The organization used the funds — which largely came from Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon — to support its Beyond Coal campaign. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club when the donations were made, was a vocal supporter of natural gas as a “bridge” fuel. He accompanied McClendon — whose company is deeply involved in extracting natural gas through the controversial process of hydrofracturing shale formations — on trips to promote natural gas over coal, though Pope never divulged the large anonymous donations from McClendon, Time reports. Michael Brune, who became executive director of the Sierra Club in 2010, persuaded the group’s board to stop taking money from McClendon and to refuse millions of additional dollars that McClendon was reportedly prepared to give the Sierra Club. “The size and secrecy of [Chesapeake’s] gifts has prevented us from having an open and candid relationship with our supporters,” Brune wrote in a memo. He told Time, “The first rule of advocacy is that you shouldn’t take money from industries and companies you’re trying to change.”

Photo by JustTooLazy/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by John Gartner

Even before selling its first all-electric sedan, Coda Automotive has spun out a subsidiary looking to take its battery technology in a new direction.

The newly created Coda Energy will leverage the company’s expertise in designing automotive battery systems and apply it to the grid energy storage market. Coda Energy hopes to carve out a niche in the burgeoning market for lithium batteries that will be used to support utilities, renewable power, and microgrids.

Coda is hardly alone in this move. Many battery companies that originally targeted the automotive market (e.g., A123 Systems and Ener1) have widened their focus to include the grid storage market.

With its origin as an automaker Coda is unique, but the company has built up several battery assets that it will use to pursue grid opportunities. The company’s batteries are produced in China through a joint venture with China’s Lishen Power Battery, and Coda acquired battery management systems company Energy CS in September of 2011. This expertise in building complete battery systems can be applied to either market, although there are important distinctions (customers, regulatory requirements, etc.) that Pike Research will be exploring in an upcoming webinar.

Though sales from lithium ion battery makers to the transportation industry are expected to be more than four times greater than to the grid services market ($14.6 billion and $3.5 billion, respectively, in 2017), having a secondary battery market is essential to producing batteries in volume and for competing with other similarly diversified companies.

Diversifying the battery customer base is a credible strategy for a young company, but dividing the company’s attention even before the first sedans are sold (cars are due to ship in February) could give the impression that the Coda is hedging its bets on becoming a serious contender in the EV world.

Coda is also hoping to build batteries packs in Ohio, but it has been waiting for a loan from the Department of Energy. Approval for that loan would face intense political scrutiny as many of the clean tech companies that have received loans have been in Republican crosshairs since the Solyndra debacle.

Most recently, on January 26, 2012 DOE loan recipient and lithium ion battery maker Ener1 filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the political blowback occurred almost immediately. However, as PluginCars.com pointed out, state and Federal and state financial support started during the Bush Administration, and was championed by Indiana’s Republican governor Mitch Daniels, who is featured in an Ener1 promotional video.

Photo by woodleywonderworks/flickr/Creative Commons

John Gartner is a senior analyst at Pike Research and a co-founder of Matter Network.

by Pete Danko

Here’s an easy way to generate heat: Raise the issue of the health effects of utility-scale wind power production. Massachusetts just did so in a big way, releasing a draft report by an independent panel that dismisses the most explosive charges by wind critics—that living near big wind farms can cause a range of devastating health effects sometimes lumped under the term “wind turbine syndrome”—and generally pooh-poohs the idea that turbines are anything more than a possible annoyance.

The state-convened panel of medical and environmental health experts didn’t look at particular wind installations and their impacts, but instead reviewed both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed material in their areas of expertise. On a full range of issues, the panel found little or no evidence to back up claims that low-frequency sounds from turbines harm the vestibular system, that turbine noise brings psychological distress or mental health problems, and that there is an association between turbine exposure and pain and stiffness, diabetes, high blood pressure, tinnitus, hearing impairment, cardiovascular disease and headache or migraine.

About the only points where the panel allowed for some possible, limited adverse impacts was on the issues of annoyance and sleep disruption.

On annoyance the panel concluded: “There is limited epidemiologic evidence suggesting an association between exposure to wind turbines and annoyance. There is insufficient epidemiologic evidence to determine whether there is an association between noise from wind turbines and annoyance independent from the effects of seeing a wind turbine and vice versa.”

And on sleep disruption the panel said: “There is limited evidence from epidemiologic studies suggesting an association between noise from wind turbines and sleep disruption. In other words, it is possible that noise from some wind turbines can cause sleep disruption.”

The Massachusetts study mirrors findings from an Oregon health impact assessment on wind power released in draft form earlier in January. Along with numerous positive impacts, it found no adverse impact at levels under the state’s noise standards but did allow that “sound from wind energy facilities in Oregon could potentially impact people’s health and well-being” when it exceeds state standards, and that “the potential impacts from wind turbine sound could range from moderate disturbances to serious annoyance, sleep disturbance and decreased quality of life.”

The Massachusetts panel, convened by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, received public comments last summer as the report was being compiled, and the draft is open for comments through March 19. But wind critics have already begun denouncing the report, popping up in news articles and taking to local newspapers to claim it was biased, incomplete, misguided or all of the above.

Massachusetts barely registers as a wind-power producer, with a mere 38 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity as of last fall. By comparison, Texas has more than 10,000 MW, and even New York has 1,349. But Massachusetts has big plans to boost that number, aiming for 2,000 MW by 2020 [PDF], although a good chunk of that is expected to be offshore.

Reprinted with permission from EarthTechling

by Ed Struzik

Canada’s Nunavut Territory is the largest undisturbed wilderness in the Northern Hemisphere. It also contains large deposits of uranium, generating intense interest from mining companies and raising concerns that a mining boom could harm the caribou at the center of Inuit life.

Until her semi-nomadic family moved into the tiny Inuit community of Baker Lake in the 1950s, Joan Scottie never knew there was a wider world beyond her own on the tundra of the Nunavut Territory in the Canadian Arctic. She didn’t see the inside of a school until she was a teenager and didn’t venture south until she was an adult.

But that all changed in 1978, when a Soviet satellite carrying 100 pounds of enriched uranium for an onboard nuclear reactor crashed into the middle of the wilderness she knew so well, resulting in a military search that recovered some of the radioactive debris. Everything that Scottie learned about uranium after that convinced her she wanted nothing to do with a mineral that had the potential to cause such serious health problems or be used for military purposes.

So when a German mining company showed up at Baker Lake ten years later with a plan to extract uranium from an area that included a key caribou calving ground, Scottie and her Inuit neighbors weighed the environmental implications against the economic advantages and voted emphatically to say “No.” The German company eventually dropped its plans.

Now, however, the Inuit grandmother of two finds herself once again on the front lines of a grassroots movement trying to block several new companies from mining uranium from the same lodes near Baker Lake. And this time the playing field has changed.

The Canadian government has made it clear that Arctic mining will be one of the cornerstones of the country’s economic future. It is encouraging mining companies to exploit the deposits of gold, silver, zinc, diamonds, uranium and other minerals and metals found in abundance in the vast areas of the enormous Nunavut Territory, as well as the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

In spite of the global recession of 2008 and the March 2011 meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which caused some countries to reconsider nuclear power, uranium exploration is proceeding at a record pace in this part of the world. In Scottie’s backyard, the French mining giant, Areva — partnering with JCU Exploration of Canada and the DAEWOO Corporation of Korea — is actively exploring a major uranium lode at Kiggavik, the site of the former planned German mine, 50 miles west of Baker Lake. Other companies also are considering building mines in the surrounding tundra. In the territory of Nunavut alone, more than $322 million was spent on uranium exploration in 2011, up from $189 million in 2009.

The Inuit are split on the wisdom of large-scale uranium mining in their territory, with some saying their communities desperately need the economic development, while others are concerned about the environmental fallout from the industry. With a population of just 30,000 mostly Inuit people living in a territory the size of Western Europe, Nunavut — which contains a sizeable part of mainland Canada as well as most of the country’s Arctic Archipelago, extending nearly to the North Pole — remains the largest undisturbed wilderness in the northern hemisphere. Though some mining roads exist, not a single road connects its 25 communities. As a result, some of the biggest caribou herds in the world — ranging in size from 65,000 to more than 400,000 — migrate freely.

Scottie, other Inuit, environmental groups, some scientists, and the country’s environmental agency, Environment Canada, are concerned that a mining boom in parts of Nunavut will interfere with the calving and migration of caribou, which already are experiencing stress from a warming Arctic climate. These groups also worry about contamination from uranium mining, especially given the history in northern Canada of mining companies abandoning their mines and performing little, if any, environmental cleanup.

“What happened in the past is a concern,” says Ramsey Hart, who works for Mining Watch, an environmental watchdog based in Ottawa. “With uranium especially, we’ve seen prices rise and fall dramatically in relatively short periods of time. What happens to these open pit mines and roads and tailings if the mines are no longer economically viable? And what happens to caribou? Their numbers in the Arctic are already down dramatically.”

Last year, seven companies searching for uranium held 554 active leases to explore on the Beverly caribou herd's traditional calving ground. Only a fraction of these projects will be move forward. But experts say that by 2017, eight mines may begin production in the Kitikmeot region, which encompasses the northwest portion of mainland Nunavut.

Mining companies vow to take steps to minimize disturbance of Nunavut’s caribou herds and say that the development of a uranium mining industry will bring jobs and prosperity to this undeveloped region. Areva — which for its Kiggavik project is proposing one underground mine and four open-pit mines, as well as roads and a port to ship out concentrated uranium — says the project would create at least 400 jobs and would have an annual payroll of $200 million for nearly two decades. Areva spokesman Barry McCallum told The Canadian Press that the company’s mill to produce uranium concentrate could also attract other uranium mining companies to the region.

Tom Hoefer, the executive director of an industry group, the Chamber of Mines, has suggested that all this new interest in Nunavut will require the building of 400 miles of new roads and will lead to the revival of previously shelved mining projects. “Surely this presents a tremendous opportunity for local arrangements to construct, to maintain and to operate this infrastructure,” Hoefer said at a trade show in Nunavut in September.

Some Inuit enthusiastically support mining, especially now that the settlement of aboriginal land claims gives the Inuit the mineral rights to 10 percent of the 350,000 square kilometers of land they were given title to. The rapidly growing population is in desperate need of jobs, and the Canadian government, the Nunavut government, and the Inuit-owned corporations set up to manage the land-claims assets believe mining could address that need, as well as bring in revenues to native corporations. The Nunavut Impact Review Board is now studying the Kiggavik project, which is the farthest advanced of any of the proposed uranium mines in Nunavut.

The history of mining in Nunavut has been a short and disjointed one, thanks largely to high costs of fuel and transportation and the fact that there are scarcely any roads in the regions. There is just one mine — the Meadowbank gold mine near Baker Lake — currently operating in Nunavut territory.

Canada is the world’s second-largest producer of uranium, with three of the top ten mines in the world located in northern Saskatchewan near the Nunavut border. And uranium isn’t the only hot commodity in the Arctic; soaring gold prices are leading to a so-called “new gold rush” in the Yukon, where activity in 2011 was unprecedented in scope.

The scramble for uranium is a more complex story. No one knows where the uranium will go when and if it’s extracted. The industry is notoriously guarded about releasing such information. But most experts believe that China and several European countries that rely heavily on nuclear power — most notably France, home of Areva — will eventually drive up prices, which are now near five-year lows.

Looming over the current debate about mining in the Arctic is the legacy of past mineral extraction. The Canadian government is currently on the hook for an estimated $4.5 billion to clean up dozens of uranium, gold, sliver, and zinc mines abandoned in the northern territories, including two in Nunavut.

One of those mines, Eldorado Mining and Refining, was a government-run corporation that dumped some of the more than 750,000 tons of radioactive tailings from uranium mining into the pristine waters of Great Bear Lake. Located in the Northwest Territories just west of the Nunavut border, Great Bear is the third-largest lake in North America and the seventh largest in the world. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent cleaning up that site and on compensating aboriginal people whose health may have been affected by the contamination.

While the government of Canada has introduced legislation to ensure that at least some of the costs associated with reclamation are accounted for in future developments, critics believe there are still serious risks.

For Inuit like Scottie and the Baker Lake Hunters and Trappers Organization, the plight of caribou — which have been central to the Inuit’s subsistence culture — lies at the heart of the issue. Caribou numbers were down dramatically in some places in the Arctic in recent years thanks largely to cyclical fluctuations that occur naturally. But a rapidly warming climate also appears to be taking a toll. Concerned about several issues — including mining’s impact on caribou — Environment Canada wrote to the Nunavut Impact Review Board about the Kiggavik project: “Environment Canada is of the opinion that there is the potential for the project to cause significant adverse environmental impacts.”

Scientists like Don Russell — a former Environment Canada researcher who now heads up CARMA, an international network that shares research data and information on caribou — said that new mining and energy development, coupled with regional climate change and more efficient hunting techniques used by the Inuit, may cause further caribou declines. That’s because almost everything scientists have learned over the past three decades suggests that these animals need space, especially when they’re calving.

In spite of the high stakes both for the economy and for the environment, neither the mainstream Canadian media, nor most environmental organizations, have paid much attention to an issue that promises to rewrite the future history of the Arctic.

“No one but us hunters and trappers are talking about what this all means to caribou and other Arctic animals,” says Scottie. “We already have one mine. Maybe another mine won’t hurt. But there are a lot of other companies up here who have big plans as well. What happens if they get their roads, their open mine pits, and their shipping ports. What happens then?”

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Brittany Gibson

The New Year is upon us, and President Obama has delivered his State of the Union address, which offered high-level insight on the energy sector in the US but was reminiscent of messages we’ve already heard. Now it’s time to turn our attention to another really important event of the year: the 2012 Super Bowl. As always, this year’s game will be a staggering display of athleticism and energy consumption (rather than verbiage and applause). These two things, generally not discussed in the same conversation, offer a more nuanced look at the energy sector here in America.

Every year the stats at the Super Bowl pile up like Tom Brady’s passing yards, including the kilowatt-hours (kWh) consumed. The 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas, Texas set a record, becoming the most highly viewed television program in American history. Almost 16 million people tuned in, consuming roughly 11.3 million kWh through television sets alone, according to a report by General Electric. That’s enough electricity to power all the homes in three NFL cities – Green Bay, Pittsburgh, and Dallas – for 10 hours.

While many fans are focused on the number of touchdowns or turnovers, they’re generally unaware of the statistics they post in their own homes, through their electricity consumption. On a wider scale, this lack of awareness plagues the energy efficient home market, the consequence of forces on both the supply and demand side. Traditionally, consumers’ utility bills have not provided actionable information, making it difficult to interpret their consumption and how to reduce it. Simultaneously, home builders and renovators haven’t been able to articulate a sensible value proposition for energy-efficiency measures.

Appliance designs have made considerable gains in energy efficiency, but these gains are eclipsed by the proliferation of consumer electronics, like LCD televisions and digital video recorders (DVRs). According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, more than 50 million U.S. homes have more than three TVs, and more than 45 million (40 percent) homes have a DVR. The power consumed by appliances and electronics grew from 17 percent of average home energy use in 1978 to 31 percent in 2005, according the EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey. Advances in energy efficiency have historically mattered less to the American consumer than the newest entertainment device.

There is a chance the American consumer has started to pay attention, however. Major organizations like the NFL have started highlighting residential energy efficiency – like investing in 800 free home energy audits in the Indianapolis area. And according to a recent Yahoo Real Estate poll the American homebuyer’s dream home might be more energy efficient and constructed of sustainable materials.

Currently, there’s little incentive for consumers to tune in to their energy consumption. Engaging the American public through the most popular entertainment forums (e.g. the Super Bowl) and by using devices and outlets they already love (e.g. televisions and social media) may be the ticket to unlocking the energy efficiency potential in the residential sector.

Brittany Gibson, a research associate at Pike Research, concentrates on cleantech public policy and regulatory issues.

A combination of factors are coming together in India to make solar cheaper than diesel for the first time. And that's without subsidies.

India is using auctions to drive down the price of solar. Combined with rising diesel prices and cheap Chinese solar panels, solar costs are down 28 percent since December 2010.

The average price of solar panels dropped 51 percent last year as the world's largest manufacturers doubled production capacity, reports Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

"Solar is going mainstream in India, helped by Chinese pricing," says Ardeshir Contractor, founder of Kiran Energy Solar Power, a local developer told Bloomberg.

Because India has so many black-outs, many factories and homes use emergency diesel generators as back-ups. That back-up power would be more cheaply supplied by or supplemented with solar.

Demand for electricity is about 14 percent higher than the country can supply during peak hours, and 400 million people have no access to power, according to the United Nations.

In its December auction, where utilities and developers compete on price, winners agreed to supply solar energy for an average rate of $0.17 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) by early 2013.

In contrast, even though the country subsidizes diesel, it costs double that, an energy analyst at HSBC Holdings told Bloomberg. Coal still provides the least expensive energy at about $0.09 per kWh, but users have to be connected to the grid to access it.

India's largest mobile phone company, BHARTI, is switching to solar for rural cell towers that aren't connected to the grid, and the world's biggest mango-puree producer, Jaine Irrigation, is completing a 8.5 MW solar plant. Jaine expects the pay-back period to be just five years.

Diesel accounts for 4 percent of the energy that powers India's 300,000 cell towers. This month, India's Telecom Regulatory Authority recommended a minimum of 75 percent of rural mobile towers and 33 percent of urban towers run on a combination of solar, wind and diesel by 2020, reports Bloomberg.

India's National Solar Mission has set a target of producing 10 percent of its energy - 20,000 MW - using solar by 2022, equivalent to 18 nuclear reactors.

The country gives the solar industry tax breaks, has a feed-in law (FiT) and guarantees its output will be bought by the government.

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Dave Levitan

With the industry’s support, new U.S. lighting efficiency standards went into effect this month. This move, along with similar actions in Europe and China, is helping spur new technologies that will change the way homes and businesses are illuminated.

Despite an outcry from U.S. conservatives that new lighting efficiency standards infringe on personal freedom, legislation mandating greater efficiency became law on January 1. Those new standards, along with major progress in lighting research and development, are helping usher in a technological revolution: Lighting companies — both large and small, in the U.S. and abroad — are rapidly building a better light bulb.

The incandescent bulbs that have lit the world since their invention by Thomas Edison are on their way out, to be replaced by newer technologies offering dramatic improvements in efficiency, energy use, and other environmental impacts.

Indeed, the way Americans think about a light bulb will have to change: Instead of a throw-away item worth merely a few cents, buying a light bulb will more closely resemble the purchase of a long-lived appliance. LED and CFL bulbs, along with other technologies, can offer one or two decades of use, rather than the paltry year of most traditional incandescent lights.

Lighting companies in the U.S. support the new standards, which, beginning this year, will gradually phase out traditional bulbs like the 100-watt in favor of new technologies that use at least 28 percent less power. These changes bring the U.S. in line with many other countries, including those of the European Union, which began a phase-out of inefficient bulbs three years ago. China’s ban on 100-watt bulbs takes effect this year, followed by efficiency improvements for lower wattages through 2016.

The U.S. changes are long overdue. Efficiency standards for other technologies, such as refrigerators and washing machines, have been around since the Reagan Administration. With lighting accounting for around 15 percent of residential electricity use (and 35 percent in commercial buildings), phasing out the inefficient old bulbs represents a huge economic and environmental opportunity.

“There are about four billion screw-in sockets out there [in the U.S.], and today only a quarter of them have an energy-saving bulb in them,” said Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “When the standards are in full effect, we’ll cut our nation’s electric bill by about $12.5 billion a year and eliminate the need for 30 large power plants and all the pollution that comes from them. It’s a big deal.”

The new U.S. lighting standards are part of the Energy Independence Act of 2007, signed into law by President Bush with broad bipartisan support. The lighting provisions remained uncontroversial until last year, when they became a Tea Party rallying cry. “The American people want less government intrusion into their lives, not more, and that includes staying out of their personal light bulb choices,” said U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Some members of Congress falsely claimed that the legislation would ban all incandescent bulbs and require the purchase of compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). In fact, the legislation does not ban any class of bulbs, but rather requires that a 100-watt bulb now use a maximum 72 watts to give off the same 1,600 lumens. In December, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives managed to defund enforcement of the new legislation until October of this year, but despite that, the lighting industry is moving ahead with the new standards.

“The legislation is in effect, it has not been repealed, it has not been changed,” said Terry McGowan, the director of engineering for an industry group, the American Lighting Association. “We made all the decisions for this back in 2007. Once you start investing money and changing production lines, that’s very hard to turn off, and also very expensive.”

The new U.S. standards come as lighting companies — ranging from leaders like GE and Philips to smaller companies such as Venture Lighting, GrafTech, and Vu1 Corporation — are developing a host of new technologies. These include a new generation of incandescent bulbs, called halogen incandescents: 72-watt bulbs are available now, for only a few dollars and with light output close to standard 100-watt incandescents, and can screw into existing sockets.

“It’s a bulb that costs only marginally more,” said Brian Howard, co-author of a book on new lighting technologies, Green Lighting. “You get the same color, temperature, light that we’re used to. So really the only disadvantage is that they don’t last quite as long as fluorescents.” The lifetime of halogen incandescents is about two to three years, compared to six years and more for CFLs.

“I don’t think we would have these new improved incandescents on the market if it wasn’t for the standard,” Horowitz said. “The industry has known how to do this for a long time.”

In the new lighting revolution, the controversial compact fluorescent bulb will almost certainly lose ground to newer technologies. The unfamiliarly shaped CFL bulbs gained infamy due to shortcomings in light color and quality, along with warm-up delays and an irritating hum. But prices have come down and many of the technical problems have been addressed. The efficiency improvement is undeniable: A 100-watt-equivalent bulb that produces 1,600 lumens uses only 23 watts and lasts up to 10 years.

One issue seized on by opponents is the small amounts of mercury inside CFLs. But Horowitz said that CFLs still release far less mercury into the environment than incandescent bulbs. “While incandescents don’t have mercury in them, they cause three times more [mercury] emissions at the power plant than the CFL does,” Horowitz said. “And CFLs are down to two to three milligrams of mercury, which is the size of a pen point, and it stays inside the bulb.” When a CFL burns out, consumers do need to recycle them properly, but Home Depot, Lowes, and others offer such services for free.

Howard and industry experts say that CFLs are likely to be replaced in the coming decade by LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. A solid-state technology, LEDs feature electroluminescence from semi-conductors, rather than thermal radiation coming off an electrical filament as with an incandescent bulb. LEDs provide light nearly equivalent in quality and color to incandescents, while offering both efficiency and lifetime improvements over CFLs. They also are completely programmable and will allow for smarter management of a home’s lighting. Their drawback, for the moment, is sticker shock: Instead of a quarter for an incandescent bulb, a typical LED still costs more than $20.

That is changing fast. Sylvie Casanova, a spokesperson for Philips Lighting, said her company’s standard LED bulb (equivalent in brightness to a 75-watt incandescent bulb, though requiring only 17 watts) was released about a year ago at almost $40, and is already down to $24.99. GE, Sylvania, and others have similar prices for their 75-watt-equivalent LED products. With rebates now available in some states, that can come down to $15.

“Fifteen dollars for a bulb that is going to save you $142 over the life of the bulb, which is 20 to 25 years, and your break-even point is at three years,” Casanova said. “But the consumer doesn’t consider what it is going to cost them to run that light bulb. They just look at the upfront cost.”

Those upfront costs will most likely keep consumers away from some other technologies for the moment, but these may end up playing a role in the market in various ways. Electron-stimulated luminescence bulbs, or ESLs, for example, are efficient bulbs made by the Vu1 Corporation with a quality of light similar to incandescents. They make use of accelerated electrons that stimulate phosphor on the surface of the bulb, which emits light. The company says this results in 70 percent efficiency improvements over incandescents. So far, only a 65-watt-equivalent floodlight bulb is commercially available, but other versions are in the works.

Howard said that plasma lighting is also useful, especially for large commercial or industrial spaces. One company, Stray Light Optical Technologies, produces plasma bulbs with a stunning 23,000-lumen output and a 50,000-hour lifetime. They work by converting electrical power to radio frequency power, which turns a gas inside a tiny bulb to a plasma state that generates light.

Among the technologies that may enhance or reduce the cost of LEDs are organic LEDs, or OLEDs, and quantum dots. The former, already used in television screens and other displays, provides the electroluminescence from a layer of organic compounds that responds to a current flowing through it. Quantum dots, meanwhile, are tiny bits of semi-conducting material that allow for precise tuning of the light’s wavelength. Effectively, that means that a LED bulb could approach even closer the light quality and color of a traditional incandescent bulb.

Casanova, of Philips, as well as the ALA’s McGowan, acknowledged that the industry generally views LED dominance as inevitable. But not everyone thinks that is a foregone conclusion. Horowitz said that each of the main technologies — CFLs, LEDs, and new incandescents — has its advantages, and which one comes out on top is far from guaranteed.

One thing is certain, experts say: Consumer savings will start to pile up quickly. “Many people have 20 to 40 sockets in their home, so it really adds up,” Horowitz said. “The average consumer... once they switch out their bulbs could save 100 to 200 dollars per year.”

Even small steps have big ripples in this field: According to the U.S. Energy Star efficiency program, if every home replaced just one bulb with a more efficient version, the country would save $600 million a year.

Photo by John Loo/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360