DOE has decided many lightbulbs don’t have to meet efficiency standards

Enlarge (credit: Gordon Wrigley / Flickr)

Among the stranger subjects that has been caught up in the political wars raging in the United States is the lowly lightbulb. Back in the George W. Bush administration, a law was passed that set efficiency standards for a variety of lightbulbs and allowed the Department of Energy (DOE) to expand the standards going forward.

Almost immediately afterward, legislators who apparently find efficiency a threat to the American way of life had second thoughts, and they started undermining the law's implementation. As a result, the first real evaluation and update of the standards didn't take place until late in Obama's second term. Now, the Trump administration has officially thrown out the results of the work done by Obama's DOE and has issued a rule that prevents the standards from applying to a variety of bulbs.

How in the world did we get here?

So how did lightbulbs become a political controversy? Back during the second Bush administration, bulbs were an obvious target for efficiency measures, given how poorly incandescents do on those measures and due to the fact that there were promising newer technologies—compact fluorescents and LEDs—that hadn't really put a dent in the incandescent markets. And, while individual electricity savings would be small, nationwide standards would ensure that the overall savings could be substantial. Increased efficiency on that scale has been a contributing factor to the United States' ability to lower its total electricity use even as its economy has expanded.