It's been a gradual process but Edison's incandescent light bulb has faded off into the history books as of January 1, 2014.

Just a completely off the wall thought:

[INDENT=1]What will cartoonists now use above a cartoon character's head when they have a brilliant idea? A CFL just doesn't seem to have the same impact.[/INDENT]

Your thoughts?

Funny! Maybe we should have a competition for what new object appears over someone's head when they have a great idea. I guess technically, using an incandescent light bulb is now a sign of an obsolete idea

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LOL! Would an LED be a small idea?

You might be on to something. Maybe we could say it is a "more efficient idea"

and you can vary the input to increase the brightness of the idea

Well they are gone - sort of - [url='http://www.newcandescent.com/']www.newcandescent.com/[/url]

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Awesome Zog!. As a serious Jimmy Page fan, I love this!

Sad that our government is reduced to living peoples lives for them.

But I do think the LED promise sounds like science fiction (very good!) and could revolutionize our consumption as the fixtures and bulbs become normal.

LED's and CFL's greatly reduce electrical demand but I wonder with all of the "green" energy devices, reduced demand, energy efficiency, photovoltaic systems, etc. are electric utilities taking a financial hit? Seems like their revenue stream is being legislated away.

Utility finances are more complicated than that. Generally the most cost effective generation is online, and as demand is increased less efficient generation is brought online to meet the increased demand. At a certain point, the incremental cost to generate electricity can actually be higher than the incremental increase in revenue. At that point, it's beneficial for the utility to reduce energy usage. Reducing usage all the time by lowering lighting energy consumption can reduce those peak values by enough to help out with overall costs.

Funny! Maybe we should have a competition for what new object appears over someone's head when they have a great idea. I guess technically, using an incandescent light bulb is now a sign of an obsolete idea

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FARASAT

Biggest utility expense is the power grid: maintaining and building the distribution and transmission system to serve the customers. Back in 1980 that was about $20k per customer on a medium utility, I would guess that is now north of $60k due to inflation and more expensive methods. That needs to be paid for, interest on the investment; regardless of generation and fuel costs. On the other hand fuel might actually constitute less than 6% of the cost of delivered power.

Your concern is legitimate, and though there may be pockets of "avoided cost" where short term savings are achieved through conservation projects, in my opinion those are not sustainable if normalized to all customers over all times to formulate a base load case.

(For this reason, your power bill will eventually go up when a neighbor puts in a solar array. If the person putting in the solar array is from a foreign country (i.e.: China) the government through "conservation programs" is indeed taxing the citizens for foreign profit.)

Funny,but R.I.P!

I checked into this a few years ago. Demand at least in the Southeast decreased over the 2000-2010 period by about 8%. The major claimed reasons for this is that data center power usage has gone down dramatically as well as lighting. The data center thing makes sense...we used to run servers and even home PC's that had 400+ Watt power supplies. Now even high end laptops run on 50-100 W power supplies and this continues to decrease. And for a lot of other good reasons, the general trend for servers is to buy 2 or 3 really big ones and then run say a dozen virtual servers on top of those, or just eschew owning your own servers and offload it onto a large Amazon, Google, or Microsoft data center. The net effect is that as you aggregate everything together the "wasted" resources are redistributed and the overall electrical as well as hardware cost per server, including watts per server, decreases dramatically. Thus the huge increase in electrical demand which was technology driven in the 1970's through the 1990's finally reversed course. At least that's the theory.

Or it could just be the double dip of a recession in 2001 followed by a weak recovery and then a second one in 2009 causes everything to look statistically flat or downward trending.

The cost per kwhr of course is on the rise but not because of inflation but government interference. Hands down the cheapest source of power in the U.S. is probably a toss up between cogen which is really just waste heat utilization and thus "free", and hydro but we ran out of things to dam up a while ago. Next in line is nuclear, followed by coal, and still followed by gas, and then all the alternative fuel stuff. Coal and nuclear are base load plants and it's economically a terrible idea to use them as peaking stations. Gas plants on the other hand can start and stop on a dime. Even with fracking and more pipelines though, gas is still more expensive by a wide margin compared to coal, but the government got involved and is pushing not only gas but a bunch of other stuff that is 10 times more expensive than nuclear and at least 3 times more expensive than coal. So even as demand is actually decreasing around the country, costs are getting higher and higher and not because of inflation.

Keep in mind that this idiotic system is actually beneficial to utilities. The cost of electricity is regulated since utilities are natural monopolies. So as long as their costs increase, they can go to the utility board and push for price increases and then share the profits with their stock holders. If you increase the cost and thus price per unit of electricity, this means that even if margins remain fixed, the total profit is still increasing. Thus as long as they don't get caught at it or the local boards don't get wise to it and allow customers to negotiate with anyone producing power on the grid, which drives utilities towards maximizing efficiency, it is actually a benefit for utilities to be as expensive and inefficient as possible, because they can just pass that inefficiency on to the customers.

I got my granddaughter an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas. This is a toy oven that allows a young child to actually prepare and cook simple recipes. The oven requires a 100w bulb to operate. I am going to look for one today. Hope I can find one. I'll probably buy several if I find them. The other places I need incandescent bulbs are my garage and front porch lights. As OJ noted, CFL's just don't work well when located in cold areas. When I turn on the light in my garage or on the front porch I need light now, I don't want to wait for it. Although incandescents have not been outlawed here, they are getting harder and harder to find in the stores.

I was in Walmart last night and bought (2) 150W incandescent bulbs. I bought rough service garage door bulbs, a couple of weeks ago, at a local big box store.