HPS is much worse in that area. And fluorescent with electronic ballasts have close to no flicker at all at frequencies related to the power line.
How is the fundamental changed by presence of a harmonic?
I have seen the current waveforms of CFLs, even in my own experience. Those spikes are drawing current at the time the line voltage peaks, not leading the peak of line voltage by a lot.
Also, even a low power factor CFL draws significantly less current than the incandescent it replaces.
"Some 55% of mercury emissions are au naturel?oceans, volcanoes, and forest fires?and another 42% are man-made outside of America. U.S. power plants produce just 1% of global mercury emissions. Even if the world got rid of every power plant, fish would still ingest naturally occurring mercury."
I have never argued that CFLs do not save energy, merely that they do not save as much energy as proponents usually claim. Lumens per watt does not account for PF issues (nor THD if its not included in PF calculation). What I said was that some (not all) of the savings attributed to CFL are imaginary. Congress should have mandated minimum standards for PF and THD.
Wikipedia has a good explanation of PF.
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The significance of power factor lies in the fact that utility companies supply customers with volt-amperes, but bill them for watts. Power factors below 1.0 require a utility to generate more than the minimum volt-amperes necessary to supply the real power (watts). This increases generation and transmission costs. For example, if the load power factor were as low as
0.7, the apparent power would be 1.4 times the real power used by the load. Line current in the circuit would also be 1.4 times the current required at
1.0 power factor, so the losses in the circuit would be doubled (since they are proportional to the square of the current). Alternatively all components of the system such as generators, conductors, transformers, and switchgear would be increased in size (and cost) to carry the extra current.
Utilities typically charge additional costs to customers who have a power factor below some limit, which is typically 0.9 to 0.95. Engineers are often interested in the power factor of a load as one of the factors that affect the efficiency of power transmission."
Often, the claims made by CFL/LED proponents are preposterous. I've seen numerous articles in main stream media (e.g. NYT) and elsewhere claim that switching to CFLs will reduce total energy requirements by 20-25%. We couldn't achieve half of that even if we turned off all lights in every sector. Since nearly all of the savings have to come in the residential sector we'll be doing quite well if we get a 1% reduction in total energy. Disparities greater than an order of magnitude cannot be attributed to errors in calculation but can only be due to deliberate distortion and propagana.
This was posted to this thread earlier...
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This has a table showing worldwide energy reserves...
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If the projections for shale gas prove accurate, the picture will change significantly but, at present, the USA has large reserves of coal and small reserves of oil and natural gas. That almost guarantees that our use of coal will increase. (Montana is about to open a huge coal reserve to mining.) Given that reality, it makes more sense to work toward ways we can use the coal without increasing our carbon footprint (which may or may not be possible/practical), If we were to take all the money we now spend on energy driven wars in the mid-east and spend it on clean coal research, we might even have a slim chance at long term survival.
Some people are doomed to stay inside for most of their lives because of their sensitivity to UV. So saying CFL's aren't any more harmful than the sun is actually confirming they are indeed harmful to those people.
There are any number of biological systems that depend on light. The full-spectrum light boxes you wrote about are thought to work via the eye and brain, simulating summer light in the winter months and (hopefully) reducing depression that's well known to be more of a problem in the winter months than in the summer. Some people believe SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is due to the overall reduction in daylight hours, others believe it's the absence of the very bright, white light of summer that does the trick. The people I know that use them, swear by them. A case could be easily made the benefits are purely placebo effects, but I doubt it. Since we share so many genes with so many other animals, it's not hard to believe, that we, like them, are sensitive to daily and seasonal changes in light.
A brief search through the Merck manual at:
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lists the following drugs as having potential photosensitive effects:
Xanax Quinolones Sulfonamides Tetracyclines Trimethoprim Tricyclic antidepressants Antifungal drugs (taken by mouth) Antihyperglycemics Sulfonylureas Antimalarial drugs Antipsychotics Phenothiazines Diuretics Lasix Thiazides Chemotherapy drugs Dacarbazine Fluorouracil Methotrexate Vinblastine Drugs used to treat acne (taken by mouth) Isotretinoin/ACCUTANE Heart drugs like Amiodarone & Quinidine Skin preparations Antibacterials (chlorhexidine, hexachlorophene)
Most of us have taken at least one of them; others, many more. For a long time, nearly everyone poo-pooed the idea that CRT's were harmful to some people and caused serious skin ailments. But anyone who has owned a CRT has likely noticed that they are often the dustiest item in the room. It turned out that once the Swedes, notorious for their stringent consumer protection laws, actually did the research, they found the claims credible. They discovered that sitting in front of a CRT with its high voltage components acting as a attractant, caused people's hands, arms and faces to be showered with microscope dust particles and those, in turn, clogged skin pores with all sorts of airborne irritants, resulting in sometimes serious skin ailments.
I mention this only to point out that there are many things that seem highly unlikely until someone bothers to design the proper experiments to prove or disprove a contention. Another thing to consider is the manufacturing process. It's pretty obvious to me, at least, that Chinese manufacturers vary greatly in their adherence to quality control principles. Bearing that in mind, what happens to the UV output of a fluorescent bulb with a thin, defective or non-existent phosphor coating? It spikes tremendously. Why? Because fluorescent bulbs are designed to emit short wave UV radiation that strikes the phosphor coating, causing it fluoresce and converting the UV to visible light waves. With bad or thin phosphor, there's less material to impede the UV emissions. So I'm not at all surprised that the research varies tremendously. The items under investigation do, too.
Maybe while you are doing spelling corrections for salty you could correct your own spelling.
Everybody else knows how to spell "affect". Very few sentences ever start with "and" People might not find you credible for trying to side track a discussion by ad hominem attack.
Asbestos was identified in the Egytian Pharoah era to cause lung disease death to the knitters of the shiny silver Pharoah's coats. Our leaders were filmed promoting the products to third world countris in the early 2000-5 years. My widowed S-I-L leads an anti-asbestos group.
And I even know how to spell the word correctly, too. It starts, ironically, like the disease "Flu" - that's the mnemonic I use. Flu -ores -cent. Three separate words in one. Aren't you glad you asked so nicely? (-: You got smarter. You wouldn't want to present yourself as knowledgeable in a subject you can't spell. People might not find you credible.
Like the generations before us with asbestos, we latched onto a technology without realizing it was a health hazard. We didn't comprehend the all the ways it would ***effect*** the world.
A 15 watt CFL presents generator net torque load somewhere between 29/60 and 15/60 as much as a 60 watt incandescent does. Given the usual extent of losses for power for USA natiobnwide average after it has made it into the generator mechanical power input shaft, I would say closer to 15/60 than to 29/60, but still in-between.
It is. The usual low-power-factor electronic-ballast CFLs have little lead, no lag - it's mainly harmonic content detracting from PF. (The H in THD is "harmonic" - THD is Total Harmonic Distortion which has its own measurements, although power factor determinations for CFLs do give proper consideration to harmonic content in the currentwaveform.)
With even low power factor CFLs having somewhere between 15/60 and 29/60 as much load on gnerators as incandescents do, I would prioritize getting CFLs utilized, optimize them afterwards.
It appears to me that the total is not of global or nationwide energy usage, but some subset thereof.
Heck, that must be at least 2% of electrical power generation - good for downscaling the construction schedule of coal-fired power plants by a few.
That appears to me to still be significant, especially when combined with the dozen or two other ways to nibble down energy consumption by siimilar extent and the few ways to achieve even greater energy savings.
Not necessarily. The days are (usually) much longer in the summer, so the need for inside lighting is far less than in winter. CO2 and other emission savings are dependent on a lot of things, like whether dirty or pricey power plants come on line to handle peak loads, whether the electricity would be generated anyway, etc. and whether excess can be transferred or sold.
Remember, when building your model, to factor in the line loss involved in transmitting power far away from its point of generation. Also remember that at night, voltage in most systems is at its highest because of the excess generating capability, at least compared to the daytime load. Does having 122VAC at your outlet instead of 110VAC really translate into a substantial emission savings? I doubt it, but it's one of the ways power plant operators cope with varying demand.
When people simply equate the money they save by using fluorescents into a directly proportional amount of emission reduction, that's not a valid comparison. Electricity used at night, during "off-peak" hours is usually cheaper for a reason. It's partly because electricity has to be used when generated or it's lost. Each plant is different. Some have to keep those baseload generator turbines spinning, still outputting CO2, mercury, etc. to be ready to cope with increased demands or generator failures. How can someone really calculate accurate savings without factoring all these elements into their models?
You can't simply shut down a 200 ton turbine: if they aren't kept spinning their main shafts will deform and become unbalanced and they'll shake themselves apart. You can't slow them down to lower the output. When they are generating electricity they have to run at a fixed RPM (3600, IIRC) to create 60Hz AC power. You can run them at lower torque, but they still need to spin because some turbines are so massive that it takes hours to get them up to speed and operating temperature.
Many power system guidelines specify that a significant percentage of their operating reserve must come from spinning reserves. Why? Because spinning reserves are more reliable, have fewer issues related to "cold starts" and can respond to demand changes immediately. There are often considerable delays getting non-spinning reserve generators on line and the only options for the operator may then be to import the needed power or turn to brownouts.
So power savings, when it comes to generation, have to be calculated in terms that account for a lot of things that are conspicuously absent from the models and claims of those who believe they are saving the earth with CFL bulbs. Even shunting excess power to other parts of the grid has to be examined closely because there are Joule heating losses that increase the further away the power is shipped. Do these savings model accurately account for the cost of heating the air around the transmission lines when shunting excess capacity to another part of the grid? Doubtful.
Then there's the power factor issue to consider. Are you really saving money when the power company boosts the voltage at night to compensate for the lower demand? When I see statements that say CFLs will save precisely X amount of dollars and create precisely X fewer emissions, I'm pretty certain there's a lot of slop in those estimates. Perhaps so much slop that the claims come pretty close to meaningless guesses and wishful thinking.
As you examine each input to the model, you'll see that it grows incredibly complex in a short time. So much so that when you see a hard, fast number you can be assured that someone made an awful lot of assumptions to get there. At night, when CFL bulbs are typically on, the issue is how much less carbon and mercury is being emitted through CFL use? It could be as much as the greenest greenie claims or as little as next to nothing.
So far, I've not seen a study that even begins to account for all the known inputs. At their most primitive, studies simply compare watts and claim the savings in kilowatt hours translates into equivalent drop in emissions. But that's totally fallacious without considering all the other elements of the equation.
I will give you one common sense test. How many power plants have been shut down because of the allegedly tremendous savings we've realized by switching to CFLs? By the sound of the claims, you'd expect to see at least one or two dozen, wouldn't you?
Thank you. I explained it to him in excruciating detail anyway, for it seems not so implicit to him. I think he missed my earlier magnum opus on CFLs. I even gave him a mnemonic so that he could spell flu-ores-cent properly in the future.
I spent a good portion of my life in a SCIF helping build computer models that tried to predict a number of important statistics based on various nuclear attack scenarios. Once you become involved in something that looks at every fort, factory, armory, hospital, police station, jail, power plant, water plant, chemical storage plant, bridge, tunnel, etc, etc, in the country, you begin to appreciate the complexity and arbitrary nature of such models.
You can't build something like that without making assumptions and invariably, many of them turn out to be well-reasoned, but dead wrong. A lot of corrections to the model came after examining serious disasters that in some ways simulated nuclear attacks. Hurricanes always broke the model. So did earthquakes. It's humbling. And it's why I get verbose when people claim things about similarly complex subjects with such unwavering certainty. I've been down that road before and it's "a maze of twisty little passages, all different." It takes more than magic words or wishful thinking to get real answers.
In the "CFLs will save enough money to do X,Y and Z" argument the number of variables is astounding. Part of the problem, I am discovering, is that people believe the power grid is some sort of giant battery. They don't understand the concept of base loads, peak loads, spinning reserves and grid management. They believe, quite logically, if you save 50 watts switching from TILs (Tungsten Incandescent Lighting) to CFLs on your home bill, that represents *exactly* 50 watts' worth reduction in carbon/mercury emissions. At least that's how I understand some of the claims about CFLs. I don't blame people for thinking that way. I thought of it that way myself until I started researching it.
I think the most important concept lacking in the discussion is the "stair-step" function of power generation. Generators aren't capable of responding quickly to demand. They have basically three modes: off, idling and running. At best, CFLs are causing *some* plants to idle, at worst, all that happens is that everyone's lights glow a little brighter and there may be fewer summer brownouts. Dramatic savings? Maybe. Dramatic risks? Certainly. No one doubts mercury is a neurotoxin. No one with a brain unaffected by mercury or some other neural "nuking" agent, that is.
I'm sure you know that big, 200 ton coal plant turbines don't start and stop on a dime. These beasties form the backbone of base load power generation. The base load is power that gets generated to meet carefully projected needs no matter what the actual load. If it isn't used, it isn't saved. It's either shunted to some other part of the grid, entailing transmission losses, or the plant operators boost the overall voltage in the system, or, in grid failures, shunt it to huge resistor banks. At night the voltage at my house peaks at 122VAC but in the summer, during the day, it can drop to
110VAC and even lower. I know because my UPSs beep when it does. They're beeping more than ever before.
Usually, those type of adjustments are enough to balance the grid, but when it's not enough, generators are added or dropped. The electric company usually brings small diesel or gas generators on line when more power is needed. Sometimes they bring on old, nasty coal plants that have been exempted from the Clean Air Act because they are only occasionally used. How do you know what's being saved where unless you know these important details.?
There's no such thing as a Usenet apology. No one is ever wrong on Usenet. They're merely misunderstood or misquoted. Or, as I heard someone complain to a reporter once about a published quote: "That's what I said but it's NOT what I meant!" It's the same reason why astonishingly more than half of people surveyed believe they are better than average drivers. (-;
See my other posts. Power generation is a stair-step function, not a smooth, linear process. Power generated has to be used in real time, either by shunting it to other power companies, raising the system voltage or shunting it into resistor banks. Each is a "lossy" process that doesn't result in a smooth, linear reduction in emissions as demand changes.
Do you have a citation for that? I have not heard of OPG abandoning scrubbers. I do know that power plant operators dislike them for a number of reasons, least of which is the bite it takes out of profits to buy them. I'm old enough to remember Detroit howling that forcing them to put catalytic converters on cars would make them unaffordable. What a load of crap. I wouldn't base my opinion about the worth of all scrubbers based on a single utility's experiences with "decades" old technology.
You're not a native English speaker are you, Josepi? I suspect it's why people give you a lot of trouble about your posts. I commend you for being able to write as well as you do in a second language, if my hunch is correct. I recently bought a set of Philips LED "stumblelights" with motion detectors to provide enough light to reach every where in the house without having to turn the main lights on. They are almost exactly the same color temperature as warm CFL's and TILs, and they are quite bright enough to light the path without "stumbling." No increase in eyeglass or health insurance required.
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Well, they *will* care when it's too late. It would have been a lot better to just stop using asbestos as soon as we had a clue it was such a potent carcinogen. But we didn't and we're STILL paying enormous costs to clean it all up. Same with putting lead in gasoline. Boy, what a dimwit idea THAT was and it went on for a long, long time. Yet people act as if it's impossible that lamps containing mercury isn't a similarly dull idea.
Do you think that widespread adoption of CFLs will:
a) help LED development and pricing
b) hurt LED development and pricing or
c) have no effect?
My econ prof would assure me it's b), especially if utilities underwrite the initial cost of CFLs and not LEDs. This is really just about cost, because LEDs have really hit mainstream but most people don't know it. Many people bought one a year or two ago, it was bad, they didn't look again.
I learned a valuable lesson from Bob Bass when I was grousing on line about how I couldn't see LCD monitors from an angle. He said "You haven't seen the newest ones" and darn it he was right. In the two years since I had bought my monitor, amazing advances had occurred in LCD displays. The speed, the angle of view, the contrast and brightness were incredibly improved over my then "top of the line" display.
The same is true for LEDs. I was astounded at the light quality of Philips' recent offering. So now it comes down to cost and denial. People don't like admitting to themselves that they may have made a mistake. They don't like to consider that they might embrace a poisonous technology over a more eco-friendly one simply over cost. So they minimize the potential damage to their peace-of-mind by several ways. First, they maximize the potential benefit of the choice they've made. Second, they attack, often without mercy, anyone who dares question their self-image as a socially conscientious person. Third, they minimize any harm their choice might entail. It's called "cognitive dissonance." You know that mercury in bulbs is bad, but you want to believe you're still helping, thus you play up what suits your argument and discard what doesn't.
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"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs but you're not helping. Why is that?"
(I thought you might need a quick pop movie quiz to 'lighten' the mood.)
One home or all of them? When you take a commodity like a light bulb, add mercury, send 10, 20 or 100 bulbs out to a million homes, it adds up. Ironically, Don, that's wonderfully simple indication that you're a victim of cognitive dissonance. You apparently believe that "little things add up" when it comes to reducing harmful emissions but discount that very same theory when it's regarding the extent or implications of new vectors of mercury pollution.
Well, it's clear from the passion of your argument that you *believe* that you are reducing emissions. And who wouldn't want to help the environment and not hurt it? To what extent your belief is *true* is the subject for less passion and more detailed modeling. I would be more than happy to help you analyze any of the studies making extravagant claims for CFL emission savings for their soundness. I did work like that for close to 20 years with much larger models. I suspect that anyone with a good sense of detail knows how complex a model it would take to prove substantial savings and how the "unintended consequence" costs in the future could easily outweigh any benefit in the here and now.
This fascinates me. You state that as if we should just believe you. No details. Just fiat. It also makes the completely erroneous assumption that this is the proper way to clean up mercury, and not by making coal plants recapture it. Present some numbers or a study and we'll work through them and I'll can guarantee you I'll find assumptions that are probably not valid.
The biggest fallacy in the CFLs save their weight in mercury is that it's somehow impossible to scrub mercury at the stack so we're stuck with this stupid tradeoff. There's that pesky cognitive dissonance again. What happens when we finally stop believing this very "credit default swap-ish" sounding mercury tradeoff nonsense and clean up the coal fired stacks? The answer is simple. CFL's will then be the number one source of mercury pollution in the environment. Brain squirming yet?
In order for you to believe you're really helping, you have to believe it's impossible to clean up mercury at the source. You virtually have to believe that to enter into a dubious "swap" agreement, swapping the alleged huge savings in emissions by adding teeny bits of mercury to every corner of the country, even those places running on hydroelectric. It's only a teensy bit, right? The problem is that each teensy bit in 3 billion bulbs adds up. But a number that large is really outside the realm of most people's experience so they just discount it.
Study after study shows that hardly 10% of fluorescent bulbs are recycled. Having places where people can drive (using energy probably not factored into the model!) their dead bulbs to is no guarantee that anyone but the most green will actually recycle them. It's also no proof against some minimum wage earner at Home Depot dumping them in a trash bin when the boss isn't looking. But there's that cognitive dissonance. You know how bad the American recycling rate is and where a lot of that mercury will end up. People will care when they can't eat fresh trout, and we're closer to that moment than you seem to believe.
We were stupid for buying into the idea of credit default swaps and we paid dearly. They were the product of some of the smartest economists in the world who believed they could eliminate risk from financial transactions. But boy, weren't all those MIT eggheads all wet! We're repeating history with this even harder to believe "adding mercury to subtract mercury" canard. Who benefits? Power plant owners, because they don't have to buy pollution control equipment as long as they've convinced people they can solve the mercury pollution with a mercury swap and that somehow this the right way to control emission, instead of at the stack where the actually occur. It's sad that it doesn't take much to fool people anymore.
I challenge you to *really* work through the numbers with me. I can tell you're a guy that doesn't like to make mistakes. That's good. You'll need that brainpower to figure out that in the great scheme of things, CFLs could quite easily end up doing more harm than good. And that's even if their only crime was to slow the development and commercial acceptance of LEDs. How could CFLs hinder LEDs? Well, if you've already stocked up on CFLs you're not likely to want to buy LEDs until you've used them all up. That lowers the demand for LEDs which in turn inhibits LED makers from reaching large economies of scale and much lower prices.
How about we make CFL's RELIABLE so we don't send nearly as many of them in the landfill? CFL's are the LEAST reliable lighting in my house. And it ain't the part with the mercury that's failing.
8000 hours my a$$. But there is a warranty. Just figure out the vendor...find your proof of purchase...mail it in to the warranty center with $4.50 return postage and they'll send you a brand new 99-cent light. Disposal problem solved...
While you have a lot of good points these ones are absolute crap.
I have been inside shut-down 200 tonne turbines and they didn't fall apart. This is done on a regular basis to make sure they stay healthy.
Power compmaies do not turn up the voltage at nights. The voltage rises due to less VA draw online and the line losses become a smaller factor of the delivered voltage.
Excess generating capacity has nothing to do with voltage, at any time. The voltages are maintained (regualted) at the generator, at the high tension line receiving point, at the dustribution station and manually at your yard trensfomer somtimes. The government specs are plus or minus 10% at any voltage level.
Yes some utilities do reduce the voltage during over peak times. This is to keep the peak load down to a manageable level to avoid having to drop customers off, preserving the system from failures. It is still done withint the 10% rule mandated.
that at night, voltage in most systems is at its highest because of the excess generating capability, at least compared to the daytime load. Does having 122VAC at your outlet instead of 110VAC really translate into a substantial emission savings? I doubt it, but it's one of the ways power plant operators cope with varying demand.
You can't simply shut down a 200 ton turbine: if they aren't kept spinning their main shafts will deform and become unbalanced and they'll shake themselves apart.
Then there's the power factor issue to consider. Are you really saving money when the power company boosts the voltage at night to compensate for the lower demand?
I was willing to provide some cites and continue with the converstaion until you raise the ad hominem attacks.
Troll harder....think!
See my other posts. Power generation is a stair-step function, not a smooth, linear process. Power generated has to be used in real time, either by shunting it to other power companies, raising the system voltage or shunting it into resistor banks. Each is a "lossy" process that doesn't result in a smooth, linear reduction in emissions as demand changes.
Do you have a citation for that? I have not heard of OPG abandoning scrubbers. I do know that power plant operators dislike them for a number of reasons, least of which is the bite it takes out of profits to buy them. I'm old enough to remember Detroit howling that forcing them to put catalytic converters on cars would make them unaffordable. What a load of crap. I wouldn't base my opinion about the worth of all scrubbers based on a single utility's experiences with "decades" old technology.
You're not a native English speaker are you, Josepi? I suspect it's why people give you a lot of trouble about your posts. I commend you for being able to write as well as you do in a second language, if my hunch is correct. I recently bought a set of Philips LED "stumblelights" with motion detectors to provide enough light to reach every where in the house without having to turn the main lights on. They are almost exactly the same color temperature as warm CFL's and TILs, and they are quite bright enough to light the path without "stumbling." No increase in eyeglass or health insurance required.
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Well, they *will* care when it's too late. It would have been a lot better to just stop using asbestos as soon as we had a clue it was such a potent carcinogen. But we didn't and we're STILL paying enormous costs to clean it all up. Same with putting lead in gasoline. Boy, what a dimwit idea THAT was and it went on for a long, long time. Yet people act as if it's impossible that lamps containing mercury isn't a similarly dull idea.
At this point, it apears to me that most people who died horrible deaths from asbestos inhaled visible clouds of the stuff, such as by being shipyard workers, insulation deplyment workers, etc. or housewives thereof doing laundry of clothes outright dusty with asbestos.
I hear the word "mesothelioma" mostly in radio ads by lawyers.
I see it as even more due to transmission and generator winding losses that are mostly though significantly short of entirely due to "real"/"resistive" component of current.
Not even the oil and natural gas ones?
They don't have to run at "full output power".
Appealing to chemophobia, while switching from incandescents to CFLs on average actually reduces (or slows increase of) mercury pollution?
Fairly small actually!
Where do you get that - can you cite this?
Meanwhile, the shorter-term fluctuations are handled by cranking up and down oil and gas fueled power plants. Longer term change in projected power requirements will affect the construction schedule for coal-fired power plants.
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