The California bill, if it stays in its current form, is a good example of a well-meaning measure guaranteed to lead to couter-productive results. Almost makes me wonder, if the enumeration of the standard bulb shapes and sockets wasn’t added in by someone who wanted to sabotage the intent of the bill? Its inanity is enough to make me into a conspiracy theorist!

Banning a technology is myopic, as if innovation in incandescent technology cannot happen. GE just proved that wrong. If there must be restrictions, simply setting a lumen/watt standard and surtaxing bulbs that don’t meet it makes more sense to me than a ban targeted at a specific technology.

Look at the text of the California bill.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_0701-0750/ab_722_bill_20070222_introduced.html

If enacted, there will be unintended consequences. Possible examples:

Only 25-150 watt bulbs are banned, so we’ll be seeing new 24 and 151 watt bulbs on the shelves. And manufacturers will tweak their bulbs slightly so that they can label them “plant bulbs” and “enhanced spectrum bulbs”, which are exempt. Bulbs will come in slightly different shapes, because the bill enumerates existing standard bulb shapes as being banned. Incandescent bulb sockets will change, because only the standard medium-screw bulbs are subject to the ban. Etc.

The other thing is: this is just a ban on incandescent, not necessarily an endorsement of CFLs. It seems it will spur improvements in not just CFL but other forms of lighting as well, like LED. There’s even a next-generation LED (though I can’t think of the details right now). There seems to be a lot of buzz around lighting technology right now–we’re seeing innovations daily. Measures like this one can only help.

I wonder if LED’s suffer the same characteristics?

I believe that standard compact flourescents could be dimmed if we used dimmers that were more musical than the typical dimmers we are using for incandescents. I haven’t tried one yet, but I have small variable transformers for 70 volt audio systems, which dim the audio level from full On down to Off, usually in ten steps. Because they are used for music, they don’t chop up the waveform as is done in standard incandescent dimmers, they choose from secondary transformer windings instead, therefore c-f bulbs sensitive electronic power supply’s might survive dimming with these. Though they are only rated for 70 volts, I assume they would operate fine at 117, given the light load of a c-f bulb. Some day I’ll try one and see if it works.

Since big business, eg. the hotel and restaurant industry, use interior design to attract business, there will be heavy-handed opposition to an outright ban. The best we can hope for, and what I would advocate, is legislation prohibiting incandescents with few, and well-defined exceptions.