Bad idea
Well, in their effort to look like they care about the environment most politicians forget that CF lights have a lot of disadvantages and actually are not that environmental friendly! In fact they might cause some environmental problems at a totally new level.
Some facts:
- CF lights are considerable more expensive to produce and buy; the purchase price of a CFL is typically 3 to 6 times greater than that of an equivalent incandescent lamp;
- More energy is used in producing CF lights then incandescent lights because the production process is way more complicated;
- Special electronic parts are used for a CFL; incandescent lights do not need this;
- CFLs typically should have a life span of between 8,000 and 15,000 hours, whereas incandescent lamps are usually manufactured to have a life span of 750 hours or 1000 hours, however: the actual lifetime of a CFL depends on many factors including manufacturing defects, exposure to voltage spikes, mechanical shock, frequency of cycling on and off and ambient operating temperature;
- One of the biggest life-time reducing factors with CF lights is the fact that they do not like to be turned on and off: incandescent lights are better equipped for this;
- CF bulbs are not dimmable unless you buy a special (even more expensive) kind;
- Quality of light: colors look bad and inaccurate;
- Size: CFl's hardly fit in the space of a regular lightbulb;
- To approximate the look of an incandescent lamp, the CFL burner can be enclosed behind a cosmetic glass cover. However, this causes the temperature of the burner to increase greatly, increasing the gas pressure inside the burner and decreasing the brightness (and therefore efficiency) of the lamp;
- Time to achieve full brightness: Compact fluorescent lamps may provide as little as 50-80% of their rated light output at initial switch on and can take up to three minutes to warm up;
- CFLs that are not designed for outdoor use;
- CF bulbs fail to operate at low temperatures; light output drops at low temperatures, and they may not light at all below zero degrees;
- LED lighting is a more interesting technology and may have the potential to compete with CFLs in the near future: LED lamps have current efficiencies of 30% with higher levels attainable, and a lifetime of around 50,000 hours;
- Being a gas discharge lamp, a CFL will not generate all frequencies of visible light; the actual color rendering index is a design compromise;
- CFLs, like all fluorescent lamps, contain mercury which contributes to air and water pollution; in order to reduce that problem they need to be recycled which means recycle plants will need to be designed and build which costs energy and since the plants use energy to recycle and this energy can not be attained from the recycle process itself, CFl's actually cost more energy then they save!
The only one that will be very happy with this idea is Philips Lighting; they are market leader in the production of CFl's!
To cut a long story short: I have a free tip for you. If you want to make money out of this: buy stocks in Philips Lighting as soon as this passes as a law! I guarantee you will earn big bucks!
