A friend of mine is an engineer. And a physicist. He is very clever and always does his calculations about everything. I admire him greatly. Being a mathematician, I cannot always follow his procedures, but I am sure he always does his calculations correctly.
A short time ago, he annoyed me. He showed me his calculation proving you need less than the amount of petrol that fits into a schnapps glass in order to accelerate a big BMW from zero to 150 km/h. Which is basically negligible.
Now, however, he showed me a totally different calculation. He added up what energy his family consumes. They are four: parents and two grown-up children. To be sure, they have three cars, but other than that, they live relatively reasonably. The result of his computation showed 0.1 gig watt hours per year. It came as a surprise for him, as well.
Now I find it hard to imagine what exactly one gigawatt is. Also, I do not know if the computation is correct. For me, this is a little like the billions for the banks.
However, it sounds like much, probably far too much. Above all, my friend was disappointed when he realized how little of all these 0.1 gigawatts are used for illumination. And that economizing in that area by outlawing conventional electric bulbs will have practically no effect at all with respect to his consumption.
Incidentally, he, too, believes that banning conventional electric bulbs is a step in the totally wrong direction. Energy saving light bulbs will soon be substituted by LEDs, anyway. They are produced by the semi-conductor industry who have now really woken up since conventional electric bulbs were banned on an EU-wide scale.
Now they will really jump into the breeches. In the long run, they will damage the business for all European light production companies.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
We have already published two other articles about the ban of conventional light bulbs in the IF blog. One by Edwin and one by me.
Loading ...