More on low energy lighting.
Lighting uses almost one fifth of all power consumed in the world. Switching to low energy lighting could cut this by 40%. These and other interesting facts were revealed this afternoon by Mr Harry Verhaar, Senior Director of Climate Change at Royal Dutch Philips Lighting in a telephone conversation. Harry is in Australia after having delivered a paper on lighting efficiency at the Bali COP13 conference and graciously let me record our discussion for Carbon Footprint’s. I must explain at this point that in the following recording Harry is on a speakerphone and I am sitting at my desk in my Canberra office so the audio production is not exactly FM quality brilliance. And when it came to titling and editing the file getting it done quickly was the real priority. Listening to it again I keep hearing myself typing on my laptop in the background as make notes for other questions. This is my first PodCast and I hope you enjoy it. Sorry about my cold.
Summary
I start by asking Harry what his job title actually means and he explains that it’s a global role advocating for the replacement of older, incandescent light bulbs with low energy, long life, and overall environmentally friendly bulbs.
I then ask him how much energy is actually used by lighting? Harry says that it’s not just important to him as Philips the lighting company, but globally our use of lighting is using 19% of our total electricity. If you look at what they call the Global Installed base, homes, offices, schools, street-lighting and so on. 75% are old, inefficient 40% savings. This leads to cost and energy savings and works to reduce risk of climate change.
I asked him if there were low energy equivalents for stadium lights and Harry said that of course sporting events don’t have the lighting on all the time, (however thinking about it, they’d be on many nights a week in Australia as there are always local football or cricket teams playing in ovals in Australia, something you don’t see so much in Holland,) But anyway Harry explained that they have made significant improvements in the energy efficiency of large stadium style lights and fortunately these new lights also provide much better lighting quality for both stadium and television audiences.
i ask him about life-cycle analysis of modern low-energy use bulbs and he explains that the ‘user’ phase is 95 - 99% of all energy involved in the bulb’s life. One compact fluorescent lasts 8 times longer than CF bulbs. I ask him about the mercury that is used in the CF bulbs and Harry explains that burning all that extra coal puts 4 to 5 times more mercury into the environment, and in an uncontrolled way. Their long-term vision, use of scarce resources, product life-cycles will be closed. Specialised waste management increasing collection rates and recycling. The mercury will be recycled with close to no mercury being emitted.
I asked what countries have mandated the transition to low energy bulbs. Cuba was one of the first. The whole of the EU will require energy efficient street-lighting by the end of next year. Change is happening in Asia, South Africa, 15 Caribbean and South American states, and even now in the uSA there are pushes for energy efficiency. There will be a global effort.
I ask what sort of savings we could expect. It’s 40% if you replace all today’s lightbulb or 550 megatons of CO2. Its better to use the billions of dollars society would save on positive things.
I discuss how in the Netherlands buildings have light-wells and we discuss how you get more energy efficient solutions though architecture and it doesn’t mean a sacrifice but better, healthier lighting. I explained that the CF bulbs I installed in my house blew because of the dimmers. Harry explained that they are releasing low energy Halogen lights. He discussed how ‘discharge’ lamps are being used in cars instead of halogens and how they are safer and much more efficient.
At that point we wound up and said our goodbyes. I hope you find the interview as interesting as I did. — DS
See other interviews by Harry Verhaar.
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