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Stage Lighting: A basic technology manual. |
CFL's and the environment |
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ENERGY SAVING THEATRE exciting developments in energy saving theatre can be found at: http://www.arcolatheatre.com/?cmsId=80&page=Arcola%20Energy More info on this to follow!
LOW
ENERGY LAMPS: DO THEY REALLY SAVE THE PLANET?
FACT
V. FICTION
The
idea that saving the environment can be successfully achieved via fitting
energy saving light bulbs may be fundamentally flawed. The concept of the
compact fluorescent lamp not take into account the broader implications of an
energy saving measure.
CFL’s
otherwise known as low-energy lamps have been hailed as one of the answers to
global warming. But is this so? In this document I set out many of the myths
and fictions of this subject.
Do
they save power? Well they might reduce the amount of electricity flowing at
your meter, thus in the short term at least saving you a little money. However
they don’t make much difference to the amount of power produced at the power
station for two reasons:
Firstly, the amount that light
bulbs in the home produce is about 3% of the total energy used in the UK and is
insignificant in the big picture of the lighting power used by industry. Thus
the proportion of power saved is vanishingly small.
Secondly, these lamps , especially
the lower cost ones, can produce a great deal of what is known as harmonic
distortion. This is basically “electrical dirt’ produced by the lamps
themselves which is fed back through the electrical system. The effect of this
is to counteract and make useless some of the power produced at the power
station. The extra current is about 15 milliamps per watt, so useless power needs to be produced at the power station to
compensate for these losses.
Where there are
only a few of these on a circuit, then the effect is small. But when many
millions are in use them, the effect at the power station is to put a greater load on the electricity
demand. ( “reactive’ or ‘apparent” power’). Residential utility meters measure only active
power, so utility companies can't charge home-owners for reactive power, even
though it costs them money to transport it over transmission lines. Obviously the power utilities are not going to stand for
that for long, so expect to see your energy bills rise to compensate.
A low energy light bulb has a more complex manufacturing process than a traditional light bulb, I would suggest that the energy saved during its use will have actually been spent during the four main stages of its life; 1 pre-manufacturing of all the extra raw materials, 2 actual manufacturing, 3 profitable sales stages and 4 profitable
recycling stage
Visual:
Chemical:
TUNGSTEN LAMPS
CONTAIN: glass, brass. ceramics, tungsten, a small amount of halides iodine). That’s it. Every part is recyclable. If by chance
they are put into landfill, its not good, as it wont rot down, but neither is
it actively harmful.
CFL’S CONTAIN: vaporous
methyl-mercury gases, metallic mercury, (approx
5mg) beryllium, cadmium, phosphorus and phosphates glass, ( twice as
thick as tungsten lamps), plastic, circuit boards, copper, many trace metals in
the electronic components such as germanium, and non-recyclable plastics.
Virtually none of this is
recyclable. Some of the mercury is
reclaimable for re-use, but hardly anything else. If it gets into landfill, the vaporous methyl-mercury can get into
the food chain more readily than inorganic elemental mercury released directly
from a broken bulb or even coal-fired power plants.
Mercury is probably best-known for its effects on
the nervous system. The Mad Hatter in the classic children's book "Alice
in Wonderland" was based on 19th-century hat makers who were continually
exposed to the toxin. Mercury can also damage the kidneys and liver, and in
sufficient quantities can cause death.
Environmental
considerations during mining
Mercury
comes from mining, reprocessing of ores from other mines and also from refining natural gas. It
is exceptionally harmful to the environment where it is mined (Guatemala,
Slovenia and Peru among other places) and the health of the people involved. The forest clearances and
strip mining deform the landscape, introduce pollutants such as sulphur,
mercury and salt into the biosphere Most pernicious of all is the toxic nature of the mercury the often
exploited and underpaid labourers are mining. They suffer the common diseases and injuries associated with
the industry such as lung cancer, ischemic heart
diseases, suicide and nephritis-nephrosis, silicosis and other
respiratory disease and the inevitable broken limbs.
Environmental
considerations during use
Using
CFL’s, central heating has to be run a little longer in the winter or the
thermostat turned up a fraction to make up for the shortfall in heat produced.
Environmental
considerations during disposal
At
present a staggering 60 per cent of CFL’s are disposed of into landfill,
storing up huge problems for later generations. Recycling facilities are
largely non existent at a domestic level, most local councils insisting that individual
lamps be delivered to their recycling centre, with consequent offset of the
fuel used to take them there and from there to a registered mercury recovery
firm, perhaps many miles away.
THE
FUTURE:
CFL
lamps which are being pushed big-time by the manufacturers are a short term fix to a long term
problem. New technologies are emerging which may provide domestic light in an
efficient manner, such as light –emitting diodes currently four times as efficient as incandescents,
manufacturers are aiming for 80% efficiency by the end of the decade, which
would represent a 16-fold improvement on the traditional bulb. They are easily dimmable; produce a spectrum of light which nearer approximates daylight and
boast a high power factor with little harmonic distortion.
Also
on the horizon are Litrospheres, a
beta radiation light source which has a half-light life of 12 years.
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