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A crude way to estimate embodied energy is just from the cost. It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. That might have been so
by lopmotr 7y ago
A crude way to estimate embodied energy is just from the cost. It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. That might have been something cheap and polluting like heat from coal, but it's still not much. You could look up the cost of that in India or China or wherever it's cheapest to get the worst case amount of energy or CO2 emissions.
Alternatively, plastic takes about 100 kJ/g to produce. So if the bulb has 1 g of plastic, that's about 0.03 kWh of energy. Nothing compared to the savings in electricity using it.
- larrik 7y ago> It had to take less than $1.25 worth of energy to produce and distribute. Not always, they could be subsidized to get people off of incandescents.
- rcxdude 7y agoYes, but they aren't (in most of the world, anyway).
- makomk 7y agoWhere this gets interesting is when governments decide that if LED energy efficiency is good, more LED energy efficiency is better. There's a push for minimum energy efficiency standards to be really close to the cross-over point where consumers just barely save money compared to less efficient bulbs if they meet the nominal lifetime specs, on the pretense that it's helping out consumers who are too stupid to realise that the higher upfront cost saves them money - at least in the EU and the US pre-Trump. Given the combination of more complex designs and more incentive for cost-cutting, I can't see those bulbs meeting the lifetime specs, and I do wonder if it'd actually save energy.