Last GE Factory making Incandescent closes...

[MKSheppard]

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Light bulb factory closes; End of era for U.S. means more jobs overseas
By Peter Whoriskey
Wednesday, September 8, 2010; 3:06 AM

WINCHESTER, VA. - The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

"Now what're we going to do?" said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor, which is cheaper there. So though they were first developed by American engineers in the 1970s, none of the major brands make CFLs in the United States.

"Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon," said Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But "we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE. "

Doyle was speaking after a shift last month surrounded by several co-workers around a picnic table near the punch clock. Many of the workers have been at the plant for decades, and most appeared to be in their 40s and 50s. Several worried aloud about finding another job.

"When you're 50 years old, no one wants you," Savolainen said. It was meant half in jest, but some of the men nod grimly.

If there is a green bandwagon, as Doyle says, much of the Obama administration is on board. As a means of creating U.S. jobs, the administration has been promoting the nation's "green economy" - solar power, electric cars, wind turbines - with the idea that U.S. innovations in those fields may translate into U.S. factories. President Obama said last month that he expects the government's commitment to clean energy to lead to more than 800,000 jobs by 2012, one step in a larger journey planned to restore U.S. manufacturing.

But officials are working against a daunting trend. Under the pressures of globalization, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been shrinking for decades, from 19.5 million in 1979 to 11.6 million this year, a decline of 40 percent.

At textile mills in North Carolina, at auto parts plants in Ohio, at other assorted manufacturing plants around the country, the closures have pushed workers out, often leaving them to face an onslaught of personal defeats: lower wages, community college retraining and unemployment checks.

In Obama's vision, the nation's mastery of new technology will create American manufacturing jobs.

"See, when folks lift up the hoods on the cars of the future, I want them to see engines stamped "Made in America," Obama said in an Aug. 16 speech at a Wisconsin plant. "When new batteries to store solar power come off the line, I want to see printed on the side, "Made in America." When new technologies are developed and new industries are formed, I want them made right here in America. That's what we're fighting for."

But a closer look at the lighting industry reveals that isn't going to be easy.

At one time, the United States was ahead of the game in CFLs.

Following the 1973 energy crisis, a GE engineer named Ed Hammer and others at the company's famed Nela Park research laboratories were tinkering with different methods of saving electricity with fluorescent lights.

In a standard incandescent bulb, in which the filament is electrified until it glows, only about 10 percent of the electricity is transformed into light; the rest generates heat as a side effect. A typical fluorescent uses about 75 percent less electricity than an incandescent to produce the same amount of light.

The trouble facing Hammer was that fluorescents are most efficient in long tubes. But long, linear tubes don't fit into the same lamp fixtures that the standard incandescent bulbs do.

Working with a team of talented glass blowers, though, Hammer twisted the tubes into a spiral. The new lamps had length, but were also more compact.

"I knew it was a good lamp design," he recalled recently. In retrospect, in fact, it was a key innovation. The Smithsonian houses Hammer's original spiral CFL prototype.

At the time, however, the design had one big problem. Bending all that glass into the required shape was slow and required lots of manual labor.

"I used to say you would need 40,000 glass blowers to make the parts," Hammer said. "Without automation, it was economically unfeasible. It was a lamp before its time."

The company decided to make investments in other types of lighting then being developed.

Years passed. The next major innovator to try his hand at CFLs was Ellis Yan, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, who had started his own lighting business in China and then in the early '90s turned his attention to the possibilities of CFLs.

To make CFLs, he had workers in China sit beside furnaces and bend the glass by hand. Even with the low-wages there, the first attempts were very expensive, clunky and flickered when turned on, he said. But he persisted.

"Everybody [in the industry] stayed back and was watching me," he recalled. "No one else wanted to make the big investment for the next generation of technology."

The business prospered and Yan's factories in China employed as many as 14,000 - not so far off from the 40,000 glass blowers that Hammer had once imagined would be necessary. With new automation techniques, Yan is seeking to cut the number of his employees in China, where wages are rising, to 5,000 by year's end.

Today, about a quarter of the lights sold in the United States are CFLs, according to NEMA, an industry association. Of those, Yan says, he manufactures more than half.

Someday soon, Yan says, he hopes to build a U.S. factory, though he so far has been unable to secure $12.5 million in government funding for the project.

Manufacturing in the United States would add 10 percent or more to the cost of building a standard CFL, he said, but retailers have indicated that there is a demand for products manufactured domestically.

"Retailers tell me people ask for 'Made in the USA' " Yan said. "I tell them the product will cost 45 to 50 cents more. They say people will pay for it."

Sales of the CFLs began slowly, but they spiked in 2006 and 2007, when federal and state government efforts promoted their use.

The Energy Department teamed with Disney to develop a public service announcement based on the Disney Pixar film "Ratatouille" to encourage the adoption of technologies such as CFLs. It was shown on CNN, HGTV and the Food Network.

Lawmakers in California and Nevada drafted legislation calling for higher efficiency standards for light bulbs. And in December 2007, Congress passed its new energy standards.

GE balked at the standards at first, knowing that they could impact their U.S. manufacturing. But the company also saw that with restrictions gaining momentum in more states and other countries, some kind of legislation was unavoidable. They decided to support the bill as long as it didn't amount to a ban on traditional incandescents, but instead simply set energy standards.

"We obviously pointed out to legislators that the impact of an outright ban would be an elimination of some manufacturing operations," said Earl Jones, senior counsel in government relations and regulatory compliance at the company. "But it was inevitable that some kind of legislation would be coming to the U.S."

As expected, the new standards hurt the business in traditional incandescents.

The company developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs. Even with a $40 million investment and automation, the disparity in wages and other factors made it uneconomical. The new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China, GE officials said.

The company also makes halogen light bulbs, which are an innovative type of incandescent, and Sylvania is transforming its incandescent light bulb factory in St. Marys, Pa. to halogen as well.

But the era of traditional incandescents built in the United States was coming to an end.

In announcing the plant closure here, GE said in a news release that "a variety of energy regulations," including those in the United States, "will soon make the familiar lighting products produced at the Winchester Plant obsolete."

"For those who make incandescent bulbs the law was bad for business," Yan said. "For people like us, it was very good."

Temperatures at the traditional incandescent plant here can be sweltering because of the heat coming from the machines that melt the glass. It's noisy, too, and workers wear ear plugs and safety glasses. And the pace of the work demands constant hustle, an atmosphere created by managers over the years who set up competitions among teams of workers striving to meet production goals. The winning line could post a black-and-white checkered flag on their machinery.

Jobs at the plant have been prized locally for years: They pay about $30 an hour.

One day after punching out recently, the workers gathered around the picnic tables by the employee entrance.

Some expressed grievances with the plant managers, who they note will get new jobs elsewhere, or with Congress for passing the energy legislation. Several took aim at the new new technology itself, noting that CFLs have mercury in them.

Some at the plant will be able to retire off their severance packages. Those with less time on the job, or those who are younger, have braced themselves for whatever comes next.

Some are taking classes at the Lord Fairfax Community College, hoping that familiarity with solar panels or HVAC might land them a job. Others scan the want-ads but don't see how they will replace what they were making at the factory.

This small town has not been terribly hurt by the recession; local unemployment is running at 7.5 percent, well below the national average.

But good-paying jobs in manufacturing, they said, have become difficult to find.

Beverly Carter, 50, who feeds cardboard sleeves into a machine and makes sure it doesn't jam, has worked at the plant for 32 years.

"It's very hard to find a job like that around here," she said.

Moreover, because many of the workers are in their 40s and 50s, some were nagged by worries that other employers would see them as washed up.

"We gave GE the best years of our lives," Savolainen said.

Matt Madigan, 40, and his twin brothers, Wayne and Dwayne, also work at the plant.

"We've always had a lot of industry here in the valley, I've never had a problem finding a job," he said. "A person really wanted to work, you could go from one factory to another. Everything nowadays is tougher."

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Key passage:

It requires so much extra labor to make a CFL, that China has dominated the industry, due to cheap labor prices....and because Congress mandated a ban on conventional light bulbs in 2014, there's barely enough time for LED lighting which is actually more efficient than CFLs, contain no mercury, and are easier to produce to begin to be produced in mass scales...

Law of unintended consequences.

[Mr Bean]

Key passage:

It requires so much extra labor to make a CFL, that China has dominated the industry, due to cheap labor prices....and because Congress mandated a ban on conventional light bulbs in 2014, there's barely enough time for LED lighting which is actually more efficient than CFLs, contain no mercury, and are easier to produce to begin to be produced in mass scales...

Law of unintended consequences.

At the time it was a no brainier. Want to do something that massively reduces America's use of electricity? Mandating we switch to CFL's was a no duh moment. The fault in the switch overs was the fault at the time. IE not providing any incentives (Or Disincentives to China) to producing CFL's in America. Law of unintended consequences my left foot. We have been in a three decade long stretch of time where if it was possible to move production oversees we've done so, regardless of if it makes economic sense or not.

*Edit
As for LED lighting. I'm not yet impressed. I've seen dozens of LED lightblubs and while they are nice in a spotlight situation for general room lighting they leave much to be desired.

[Kanastrous]

Aside from the labor overhead, doesn't CFL manufacturing also involve the use of nasty toxic materials that are less intensively controlled in China, than in the USA? Less environmental regulation in China might make their bottom line more competitive too.

We're increasingly using LED set lighting - my brother in law holds several patents in that area - but I likewise have yet to see home LED lighting that I'd want to work and live under...

[Gil Hamilton]

Specifically, CFLs contain mercury, which needless to say is tightly controlled in the United States. China has a bit more of a "Fuck the watershed, we're doing this" attitude than the US has.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I would just like to point out that the first commercial CFL was made by neither of the people mentioned in the article, although Ed Hammer probably was responsible for the idea of a coiled CFL. This was in fact the first fully productized CFL:

http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Spec%20Sheets ... 20SL18.htm

At least in Finland Philips SL lights were already a fairly frequent sight in the late 1980s, although more commonly used in public spaces as replacements for older incandescent bulbs rather that for home lighting, which had to wait for more compact and lighter solutions.

Also educating is this page from the same site:

http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Spec%20Sheets ... ornado.htm

Which acknowledges the role of Ed Hammer and Ellis Yan's company, but also says: "In fact the spiral CFL is a very poor lamp in terms of efficacy." This is of course compared to other types of CFL, which use straight tubes. The latest models of those are quite compact as well, so about the only advantage that the spiral CFLs retain is that they are esthetically pleasing.

[His Divine Shadow]

This reminds me of what they said on the radio today, CFLs are having negative effects on the electricity grid according to Tampereen Sähköverkko (a finnish power company) who are saying they want/need to increase transmission-fees 5-6 times to compensate for their additional costs. This could apparently be avoided with better quality CFLs but most people buy the cheapest they can find.

[aerius]

This reminds me of what they said on the radio today, CFLs are having negative effects on the electricity grid according to Tampereen Sähköverkko (a finnish power company) who are saying they want/need to increase transmission-fees 5-6 times to compensate for their additional costs.

If you have an oscilloscope it's pretty horrifying to see what a CFLs will do to the AC power that comes into your home. Normally the AC should be a nice smooth sine wave, plug a few CFLs into the line and that sine wave becomes more like a square wave, the tops & bottoms of the sine gets chopped off and flattened and it also puts a whole bunch of noise back into the powerline. If you have an HDTV you might notice that the picture quality isn't quite as good when there's a bunch of CFLs in the home that are turned on.

The other issue is that it screws up what's known as the power factor, the phase of the current & voltage don't match up as they should which decreases the efficiency of the transmission system. Which would explain why they want to jack the transmission fees, but 5-6 times is pretty excessive.

There are ways to design them so they won't screw up the power but the problem is it's expensive and it makes the ballast for the bulb bigger and less efficient so it may not fit into certain light fixtures.

[Hawkwings]

Why do CFLs mess up the AC power line?

[Kanastrous]

It's a phenomenon called harmonic distortion. I can't explain it well enough to do more than suggest looking it up.

[Simon_Jester]

Are there any kinds of light bulbs, aside from incandescents, that don't do that?

[Gil Hamilton]

Are there any kinds of light bulbs, aside from incandescents, that don't do that?

As far as I know, no. The only reason that that incandescent lights don't do this is that they are purely resistive lighting (that is, you shove current through something with a high resistance and it heats the wire till incandescent).

The problem with that criticism is that most electric loads will add harmonic distortion to a signal, not just CFLs (most electric elements have some). The issue is how much. The reason electric companies may complain is that there are really shitty CFLs out there that make an AC current signal really crunchy on the way out. The issue is not with CFLs in general, but the quality.

As to why this is bad for he that asked it:

Here's basically how it works. When you run a pure signal through an electric device that isn't purely resistive, the signal will end up with harmonic overtones baked into the signal. Those of you who have taken some calculus courses or have wondered why square waves on oscilloscopes look the way they do (IE not quite square), when you add up enough sine waves, you'll end up with a square wave, which is approximately direct current that flips between two values. While DC is used for electronics, it's shit to transmit over any distance and you really only extract power from the fundamental anyway typically. So these distorted outputs may have significant harmonic garbage in them that doesn't transmit as well. They define a value called THD (total harmonic distortion) which is the sum of the power of all the harmonics divided by the power of the fundamental, and for an electric device, less than 10% is generally considered acceptable (though it depends on what application, audio equipment, for example, what is considered acceptable has a MUCH higher standard).

Why do they care? Surely a signal CFL isn't going to do that much damage. And you are right. Now put up ten million shitty CFLs. Then it gets a bit uglier. What needs to done is give CFLs an industry standard that all of them must be below a certain THD.

[aerius]

Why do CFLs mess up the AC power line?

All fluorescent lights require what's known as a ballast to control the voltage and current going through the light. In the old days this was a large heavy box with a bunch of electronics inside, but you can't use them with CFLs since they're too big. CFLs use a switched mode power supply hooked up to some additional electronics to perform the functions of a traditional ballast box, it's the only way to make it small enough to fit with the bulb. The problem with a SMPS is that the rapid switching of the transistors creates a ton of noise, all transistors have a capacitance to them which means they store energy to some extent, and when they're switched off that energy gets dumped back into the circuit and the powerlines. It's similar to the effect of slamming a faucet from wide open to shut as fast as you can, it creates a pressure wave in the pipes and you get "water hammer" as the pipes rattle around.

For space and cost reasons, CFL manufacturers are unlikely to build the filters into the ballast to remove the switching noise from the SMPS. And that's why the damn things mess up AC power lines.

Are there any kinds of light bulbs, aside from incandescents, that don't do that?

LEDs don't, unfortunately the problem here is in the electronics. A single white LED runs at about 3-3.6V DC. So you need to go from AC to DC to run the LED, plus you either need to drop the lines voltage or string together a bunch of LEDs in series to get it to the powerline voltage. Unfortunately the most economical way of doing this is...a SMPS, the same piece of shit thing that's in a CFL. You could do it with a transformer and a conventional linear power supply but then you need a big heavy external box.

[Uraniun235]

How big and heavy is that box? Would it be possible/feasible to build a lamp or fixture that would do that job for the CFL rather than trying to pack it into each individual bulb? Obviously you break compatibility with the old incandescent bulbs and fixtures, but if we're banning incandescents anyway then it could be worth it to keep the power grid clean(er).

[Kanastrous]

Once a standard becomes near-universal I should think the requisite stuff could be built into receptacles instead, if not installed room-by-room in the house's wiring...

[aerius]

How big and heavy is that box? Would it be possible/feasible to build a lamp or fixture that would do that job for the CFL rather than trying to pack it into each individual bulb? Obviously you break compatibility with the old incandescent bulbs and fixtures, but if we're banning incandescents anyway then it could be worth it to keep the power grid clean(er).

The old style ballast boxes were about the size of the powerbars that you plug your computers and electronics into and they could run 2 40W tubes. CFLs are generally in the 10-15W range so it should be possible to build a ballast that can be integrated into most lamps and lighting fixtures. You'd still need to do a bit of work since the old style boxes weren't 100% quiet either, they're better than modern SMPS units but they'll still put some noise & hum back into the AC lines. Those boxes need a bit of filtering too.

Personally I think the best way to take care of the noise is to stick a filter into every lamp and light fixture. The filter itself would be fairly compact & inexpensive so it can be packaged into nearly every kind of lamp I can think of, you're looking at something that's at most around the size of a pack of cigarettes. You could build the filters into the receptacles but then you start trading off filtering efficiency against power draw, a receptacle that can handle a toaster or hair dryer isn't going to be as good at filtering out CFL noise as one that's sized specifically for that task.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Funny then that Australia has been primarily CFL lit for the last decade and has none of these problems.

But I guess the M16 has no problems either.

[Marcus Aurelius]

How big and heavy is that box? Would it be possible/feasible to build a lamp or fixture that would do that job for the CFL rather than trying to pack it into each individual bulb? Obviously you break compatibility with the old incandescent bulbs and fixtures, but if we're banning incandescents anyway then it could be worth it to keep the power grid clean(er).

The old style ballast boxes were about the size of the powerbars that you plug your computers and electronics into and they could run 2 40W tubes. CFLs are generally in the 10-15W range so it should be possible to build a ballast that can be integrated into most lamps and lighting fixtures. You'd still need to do a bit of work since the old style boxes weren't 100% quiet either, they're better than modern SMPS units but they'll still put some noise & hum back into the AC lines. Those boxes need a bit of filtering too.

The Philips SL had a magnetic ballast. The problem with those is that you get line frequency flicker, that is 60 Hz or 50 Hz depending on the AC system used, and FLs with a magnetic ballast are also less efficient than ones with an electronic ballast. The SL was also quite big and heavy, and I doubt people would want to get back to those any more.

I realize that you were talking about integrating the ballast to lamps, but the flicker and efficiency problems would still remain. I think the real solution is to require stricter standards from electronic ballasts. There are already regulative bodies in existence which could do that as well.