Barmy Britian

In 2008 electricity companies in Britain were set targets to improve energy efficiency and cut fuel poverty. The companies could choose how they did this and pass the costs on to the customers. Each measure was given a score according to the lifetime carbon saving it would achieve. Electrical companies that fail to meet their targets by 2011 will be fined up to 10% of their annual turnover.

You can just imagine the head scratching that went on. There were many ways that they could improve efficiency but at what cost. Insulating the external solid walls of a three-bedroom semi-detached house would costs £8,760 and save 18.08 tonnes. However, companies discovered that could achieve the same score of 18.08 tonnes by posting out 452 bulbs to their customers at a cost of only £1,342. So which measure do you think the companies chose?

You guessed correctly. As a result, in the first eighteen months of the scheme, electric companies posted out 180 million free or subsidised light bulbs to their customers.

In July the Energy Saving Trust conducted a survey which found that the average home had six of these bulbs lying in a drawer or cupboard unused. The energy saving these bulbs were meant to achieve was based on the premise that people would immediately fit the bulbs in the most intensively used light sockets in their houses. The reality is that most got either stored away or thrown in the bin because they were either the wrong fitting or the wrong wattage.

Realising that their plan was flawed, the Department of Energy and Climate Change decided to ban the mail outs of bulbs and gave companies six months to wind the schemes down. That ban came into effect on January 1st which is why NPower posted out 12 million energy saving bulbs over the Christmas period in spite of knowing that most would never be used.

This is yet another example of the nanny state that Britain has become where rules and laws are made that are either fundamentally flawed or are misinterpreted in ways that leads to misery and waste.

Just who has benefited from this ill thought out piece of legislation? As far as I can see, the only beneficiaries are the manufactures of the bulbs. The Post Office may also have done well out of it but at a time when they are overstretched anyway.

Pam and I do use low energy bulbs for the outside lights. Since we turn the these lights on every night, there is undoubtedly a saving of energy but that is not the main reason we use this type of bulb; it is simply that they last a lot longer outdoors than regular bulbs. The only other place we would consider using them are in fittings which are hard to get to for the same reason.

The truth is that many people don’t like low energy bulbs. They are slow to come on, are mostly ugly and don’t seem to give off the same amount of light in spite of what the manufacturers say.