Spotlight on Big Government

Friday April 11, 2008

Politicians want to ban tungsten lightbulbs and dictate the level of street lighting. Adrian Brown reports.

By the end of 2008 the EU is due to have finalised the detail of the Framework Directive for the Eco-design of Energy Using Products (EUP Directive). This is expected, amongst other ‘greening’ measures, to ban the sale of tungsten lightbulbs for domestic use from 2011.

In its role as cheerleaders for EU-style micro-regulation, Gordon Brown’s government has been keen to secure a ‘voluntary phase-out’ of traditional tungsten bulbs ahead of this. From January 2009, 100 watt GLS bulbs will no longer be available on the high street and, by 2010, the supply of household 60 watt GLS bulbs will also be withdrawn.

We are being instructed to switch our home lighting over to compact fluorescent (CFL) replacements. It is, perhaps, little wonder that the major retailers should support this. A 100W tungsten bulb is cheaper than a tube of Smarties whilst occupying the same shelf-space as a profitable CFL.

Longevity

Whatever one’s opinion about the ‘climate change’ orthodoxy underpinning such moves, there is often a real economic advantage in choosing CFL over tungsten. Efficiencies are greater; four or five times the wattage is used by a tungsten bulb in order to achieve a comparable lumen-output.

But there are disadvantages too. Although the CFL fixtures (technically, they’re not ‘bulbs’) boast much increased longevity, this is true only if they are left switched on for long periods. Frequent switching reduces their lifespan significantly so that, for lesser-used rooms, they may not offer any cost advantage over tungsten bulbs whatsoever.

Unlike tungsten, many CFL fittings take time to reach their full light-output, making them impractical for applications such as landing lights. The majority are not dimmable or compatible with timers. We can see then that CFL replacements do not encourage energy efficient behaviour in use.

Hazardous

Also, because they contain small amounts of toxic mercury, they must be disposed of carefully. Should you drop one, Defra recommends the following:

“Vacate the room and ventilate it for at least 15 minutes. Do not use a vacuum cleaner, but clean up using rubber gloves and aim to avoid creating and inhaling airborne dust. Sweep up all particles and glass fragments and place in a plastic bag. Wipe the area with a damp cloth, then add that to the bag and seal it. Mercury is hazardous and the bag should not be disposed of in the bin.”

Will this happen in practise? Elsewhere, we are advised on “minimising our exposure” to broken glass, as this may also be “hazardous”.

Light pollution

The Home Office states that “brightly lit streets cut crime” and advocates the proliferation of very bright high pressure sodium fittings for outdoor lighting. The majority of UK street lighting is now of this type, characterised by a glaring peach-coloured harshness rendering very little colour and responsible for the ugly ‘skyglow’ effect, with reflected dusky-peach coloured light pollution hanging above every town in the land and extending an urbanising influence many miles into the countryside.

For many people in the UK, including rural-dwellers who are but passive consumers here, the blue-black tapestry of stars that is the natural wonder of the night sky in its true colours is just a memory. It is almost as if we are being conditioned into being scared of the dark. What does this over-lighting policy really achieve?

Peer-reviewed researches dating back to the early Nineties have demonstrated that, despite an apparently unrivalled lumen-efficiency, sodium lighting actually needs to be between three and fifteen times the brightness of commercially-available white-light sources, in order to achieve a comparable effect on drivers’ reaction-times.

Bright glare

One of the principal researchers in this field, Dr I Lewin of Scottsdale Arizona, has shown that, as lighting levels reduce, the human eye’s colour sensitivity changes to favour blues and greens; colours barely rendered by high-pressure sodium.

Very bright HPS can be uncomfortable to travel under as there’s a strobe-effect with the sudden bright glare every few seconds, and transitions between lit and unlit areas result in moments of near-blindness. Elderly drivers are particularly affected because, as we age, our retinas take longer responding to change.

Our peripheral vision is affected too; this being extremely unresponsive to orange light. Lewin describes the cumulative effect on drivers from over-bright sodium light as being akin to experiencing tunnel vision.

Crime reduction

The Home Office’s opinion about the desirability of bright lighting as a crime reduction strategy is informed primarily by one piece of meta-analysis, the Farrington and Welsh Report: Home Office Research Study 251. Farrington and Welsh made exaggerated claims not backed by the authors of the original studies, which in any case did not compare areas on a true like-for-like basis; low-crime control areas being compared to re-lit crime hotspots.

The studies were not designed to take into account the statistical effect known as ‘regression to the mean’ – extreme results could be the result of chance variation. This is particularly relevant here, as incidences of criminal behaviour are not isolated events: one individual can be responsible for a localised crime wave.

In fact, there is little evidence to support the Home Office’s enthusiasm for high levels of artificial lighting. Other studies point towards bright lighting actually increasing levels of criminal behaviour, but these are ignored.

Environmental benefit

Any suggested environmental benefit from specifying high-pressure sodium lighting is then false. Their high lumen-efficiency does not result in the production of useful illumination, only an increase in the amount of light thrown into the sky. Direct replacement with white-light sources running less than half the wattages would provide superior effective illumination at about a third of the actual brightness.

White-light sources suitable for street-lighting include blue-white metal-halide and, for lower-level illumination on residential streets, compact-fluorescent. Where CFL may have failings as universal domestic replacements for tungsten, they excel as streetlights. Where trialled, they have met with 80% approval ratings and go some way towards countering what David Hockney has identified as the “uglification of Britain”.

Engineer

Will government take its own medicine? Unlike you and me, lighting authorities currently pay a flat rate for their electricity, no matter how much they consume. There is, then, no cost advantage to them in specifying light fitments which, whilst being only slightly more expensive to purchase than their preferred high-pressure sodium lamps, would halve electricity consumption and improve our local environments in a tangible way.

Or is it perhaps rather more expedient for politicians to address perceptions around fear of crime than it is to admit the likely futility of their costly interventions? Is the excessive use of bright street lighting uglification with a purpose? And is this purpose no longer to provide amenity, but instead to engineer a sense of fear and dependence on government as the apparent ‘protector’?

Link
thestreetlights.blogspot.com