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Sensibly, the Berkeley researchers did not to attempt to re-invent the wheel. Their role was rather to offer the winners a helping hand, to share in the cost of building prototype ballasts, thus accelerate development of the technology. The results would be tested in real-world situations, then commercialized as quickly as possible. The location chosen for the first test was the main office of Pacific Gas & Electric in downtown San Francisco. Three floors were each equipped with 500 experimental ballasts: allelectronic devices from Stevens and Iota on each of two floors, and a hybrid electromagnetic system on the third. The demonstration was a resounding success, confirming that electronic ballasts did indeed reduce energy consumption, by 25 percent. Reliability proved a problem, however, as many of the ballasts failed. Improvements were made, the component count was reduced, and reliability increased as a result. “Reducing the number of components is quite an interesting intellectual enterprise,” Berman said. “So that part required some skill and some tricks in electronics in order to reduce [the number], because the more components you have, the more likely you are to have a failure.” Reducing the component count also led to miniaturization, and eventually to the compact fluorescent. Unlike fluorescent lamps, where the ballasts and tubes were separate units, the CFL would have a ballast integrated into its base.
Two subsequent demonstrations, at the Veterans Administration Long Beach Naval Hospital and the Citicorp Center in New York, confirmed the promise of electronic ballasts. And, as Stevens noted pointedly, “nobody died of pacemaker failure.” To commercialize electronic ballasts, Stevens and his business partner, Bill Alling, formed a startup called Luminoptics funded by seed money from individual investors. But entry into the ballast market needed serious muscle: it would require a partnership with one of the incumbents. The results of the DoE-endorsed demonstrations had been widely published. Clearly, electronic ballasts could no longer be ignored. In 1981 Universal Manufacturing of Paramus, New Jersey, one of the two major US makers of conventional ballasts came calling. A deal was soon struck. It granted Universal an exclusive license to Luminoptics’ technology in return for guaranteed minimum royalties and a promise to promote sales of electronic ballasts. As part of the deal, Universal hired Alling to head its new electronic ballast division and commissioned Stevens to continue his research. In fact, as soon became clear, Universal’s real purpose in licensing the technology was to bury it, to prevent electronic ballasts from coming to market and thereby protect their existing magnetic ballast business. Promised funds and other support never materialized.
Together with another firm, Advanced Transformer, Universal dominated US ballast sales. The combined market share of the two firms was almost ninety percent, a virtual duopoly. They were thus in effect gatekeepers and, working in collusion, they made sure the gate stayed firmly shut. Universal and Advanced Transformer had invested in big automated factories whose equipment was long since depreciated. Production of solid-state ballasts would require new investment, disrupting the status quo. The last thing they wanted was for their cash cow to be disturbed during milking. In 1984, Stevens and Alling quit, filing suit against Universal. They would ultimately win their case, but it took them thirteen frustrating years of court battles. During this time the pair suffered many tribulations, including bankruptcy (Stevens) and marital breakup (Alling). The jury in the trial simply could not understand why, if their technology was as good as they claimed it was, Universal would not market products based on it. Surely there must be something wrong with electronic ballasts?
In 1989, while the suit was ongoing and sales of electronic ballasts were still negligible, Stevens took the offensive. He convinced Motorola, a leading maker of semiconductors, thus a company with serious electronics expertise, to enter the market. Motorola wanted to buy the exclusive license to electronic ballast technology. Though a clause in the contract stipulated that Universal would relinquish the rights if it did not intend to use them, the company flatly refused to honor the agreement. “That was the thing that finally convinced the jury,” Stevens recalled. “They said, If this stuff was no good, why wouldn’t [Universal] give it back?” The fact that a big firm like Motorola had endorsed electronic ballasts proved their worth. At long last it became clear that the real reason Universal had sat on the technology was simply to stymie competition. The legal odyssey was finally resolved in 1997, with the jury awarding Stevens and Alling $96 million in compensation. The overall economic impact of the delay in introducing electronic ballasts was much greater. Energy-efficiency guru Amory Lovins estimated that it had cost the American public $100 billion in unnecessary extra spending on electricity bills.
Sales of electronic ballasts finally took off in the late 1990s. This was largely a consequence of their having been included in California’s Title 24 building code. The 1992 revision of the code more or less mandated the use of electronic ballasts in order to achieve the efficiency it required. In tandem with research and development, Title 24 is responsible for the adoption of new, more energy-efficient forms of illumination. It has also been one of the most important influences on the national lighting fixture market. Indeed, some manufacturers cite the California building code as the biggest single factor for change in lighting. As well as accelerating deployment of new energy-saving devices like electronic ballasts, the code also forced the lighting industry to be more creative. Since California leads the US in implementing energy efficiency, effectively acting as a laboratory for the rest of the nation and a proving ground for policies which other states subsequently adopt, it is worth pausing to look into the origins of this crucial piece of legislation.
C H A P T E R F O U R
A Cautionary Tale S urprisingly, the initial impetus to create what came to be known as Title 24 was not a consequence of the first oil crisis. Rather, it sprang from what
Bob Foster self-deprecatingly described as “a very pedestrian act.” In 1971 Foster was a 24-year-old graduate student living in the college town of Davis, just down Interstate 80 from Sacramento, California’s state capital. Making improvements to his house in East Davis, Forster poked a hole in the wall. The cavity, he was astonished to discover, contained absolutely no insulation. “I went up to the attic and looked — there was maybe an inch or two of insulation. In an area which has a number of hundreddegree days [every summer] it just seemed sort of stupid to me that that would take place.”
As it happened, Foster was then working as an intern on the California senate’s public utilities and transit committee. This was chaired by Al Alquist, an old-line New Deal Democrat. “So I talked with my chairman; I said, This is crazy — we’re building all these houses and they’re not even insulated!” Some sort of remedial action was clearly required. “In 1972, we came up with a very simple bill requiring insulation in new residential construction.” The following year, the committee began work on a more comprehensive package of legislation that would also address other aspects of energy efficiency.
Meanwhile, in the state assembly’s energy sub-committee, a bright young “new” Democrat named Charlie Warren was also investigating energy use. At the time, utility forecasts were warning that California would need numerous new power stations - probably nuclear - to meet the predicted growth in demand for electricity. Warren’s committee latched onto a study done by the RAND Corporation. It showed that many measures could be adopted to slow the rate of growth. And that, as a result, the economy would be enhanced rather than penalized. Eventually, after seemingly endless hearings, the Warren and Alquist teams joined forces to draft a bill. They submitted it on the last day of the current legislative session. “We were there till about 4:30 in the morning, it passed by one vote, and we all congratulated ourselves and went home,” Forster recalled. In their excitement, however, they had forgotten that, in order for their bill to become law, it required the Governor of California’s approval. Ronald Reagan was notorious for his opposition to government-imposed standards. Sure enough, Governor Reagan vetoed the bill.
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nbsp; A few days later, on October 6, 1973, war broke out between the Arab nations and Israel. After the US moved to aid Israel, OPEC imposed a draconian boycott on exports of oil. “Reagan’s people literally went into shock, they had no idea what to do,” recalled Gene Veranini, one of Warren’s aides. “Somebody got to the Governor and said, You need to do something about energy.” Warren and Veranini were summoned to the Governor’s office. It turned out that both Reagan and Warren came from the Midwest. “Charlie said, Governor ... you’re from downstate Illinois, and I’m originally from Kansas. Look, energy efficiency is just simple midwestern frugality, that’s all there is to it. And the Governor said, Midwestern frugality? — I like that.” Reagan desperately needed a fig-leaf to cover his administration’s lack of preparedness. Early the following year, the bill he had vetoed was passed into law, as the Warren-Alquist act. The analytical approach taken by the RAND Corporation study was embedded into the act. “What it did,” Veranini explained, “it legitimated analysis and analytical people to participate. And, literally instantly, Art Rosenfeld and a variety of other scientists and engineers came forward and they basically took the game at that level and advanced it to what we have today.”
In 1974, Jerry Brown was elected Governor of California. At just 36 years of age, Brown was, as one commentator described him, “a symbol of the glamour and the restless adventurousness of California.” Energy policy was high on his agenda. At a faculty club event at UC Berkeley, Brown happened to be seated at the same table as Rosenfeld. The physicist buttonholed the governor, telling him that improving efficiency would save as much energy as new nuclear plants could produce. Brown immediately saw the wisdom of using incentives to improve efficiency. He supervised the establishment in Sacramento of the California Energy Commission. An activist body, its mandate included the drawing up of building energy efficiency standards and the power to enforce them.
Following its enactment by the California legislature, Title 24 went into effect in 1978. Among other things, it required that efficient lighting fixtures be installed in the kitchens and bathrooms of all new homes. The new code was a remarkable piece of legislation. In the coming years, over many iterations, Title 24 would be the force driving the deployment of energy-efficient lighting, lighting controls, and ultimately LED lighting. Revised roughly once every three years, the code created a significant competency in the state bureaucracy. Most notably Gary Flamm, a former utility worker who until his retirement in 2014 was, as he put it, “the lead lighting guy,” and senior code-writer at the California Energy Commission. “I have a job to do, and it’s to save energy, but it is done in a way that protects lighting quality,” Flamm told me in 2010. “I feel good about the fact that not only are we saving energy, we’re doing it in a way that protects the human visual experience.”10
Regarding lighting, Title 24 sets out three requirements. To qualify, an improvement must be technically feasible, accomplished using readilyavailable products offered by more than one manufacturer. It must also be cost-effective, providing a payback on investment. Third, it must make a real difference in terms of energy saving. The code was Flamm’s baby. “We’ve been doing this for thirty years, we’re good at it, and the builders are used to working with it,” he said. “So there’s this synergy that goes on that helps us to keep making the standards better. We listen to everybody, we wrestle with the issues, our standards are very defensible. Other states may cut-and-paste them. Then the manufacturers say, OK, let’s make this a national standard. They often start promoting California standards in other states, because they don’t want to have to make different products, they don’t want one product for Kentucky and another one for Indiana and another one for California. So it’s not by design that we influence the national dialog, it’s by the diligence of our rule-making proceeding that we’re recognized as making a good product.”
10 In 2016, though nominally retired, Gary Flamm was still fighting the good fight. Concerned that consumers might reject LED lamps if the color quality of the light they produced was not good enough, Flamm and Michael Siminovitch of the California Lighting Technology Center convinced the CEC against the wishes of lamp makers to introduce the California Quality Lamp Specification. Though the spec is voluntary, the California Public Utility Commission directed utilities not to rebate any LED lamp that does not meet it. “All the major manufacturers today produce high-color-quality illuminants and are aggressively selling these into museums, galleries, retail, etcetera,” Siminovitch told me. “Yet when we advocate these for the average consumer, they get all bent out of shape. In my mind it’s disingenuous to profit from high quality yet deny it to consumers.”
Jerry Brown had a knack for picking capable people. To head the California Public Utilities Commission he appointed a 28-year-old whiz kid named Leonard Ross. A child prodigy, Ross had won a fortune competing on TV quiz shows. It was Ross who in 1978 solved the knotty problem of how to motivate utilities to embrace energy efficiency. Historically, the generators had been in the business of persuading people to use more electricity, not less. Any reduction in usage would hurt their bottom line. Ross came up with an unorthodox solution that severed the link between consumption and profit. “Decoupling,” as it came to be known, would make it possible for utilities to sell less power and yet not lose money. Regulators would set rates high enough for the generators to recover their costs. Incentives would reward the power companies for any drop in sales.
Decoupling was initially applied to natural gas. The following year, 1979, Brown appointed John Bryson as president of the CPUC. A Yaleeducated lawyer, Bryson had been one of the co-founders of the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental activist group which was (and remains) one of the strongest US advocates of energy efficiency. He quickly seized the first opportunity to extend Ross’s innovation to electricity. By 1982 Californian utilities could confidently invest in energy efficiency initiatives without fear that they would harm their financial health. One of their first big investments was the compact fluorescent lamp. This would be, as we shall see, a disaster.
It was perhaps unfair to call the compact fluorescent lamp a kludge. That is, according to a dictionary definition, “a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem, an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole.” On the other hand, there was undoubtedly some truth to the accusation. This is not to denigrate the sincerity or the ingenuity of Ed Hammer, the engineer who invented the CFL. Working in the laboratories of GE Lighting at Nela Park, Hammer was motivated by the first oil crisis, like Art Rosenfeld and Steve Stevens, to look for ways of reducing energy consumption. Incandescent bulbs, which turned ninety percent of the electricity they consumed into wasteful heat instead of useful light, were an obvious target. Most incandescent bulbs were deployed in homes. Long fluorescent tubes were much more energy efficient, but not well-suited for intimate domestic spaces like people’s bedrooms. In essence what Hammer set out to do was to alter the form factor of the tube so that it could replace the bulb. He realized that simply shortening the tube would not produce enough light. Better to bend it into a complex shape that would maximize its output.
In 1976, working on his own, through trial and error, Hammer came up with the idea of twisting the tube into a spiral. It was ahead of its time. To mass-produce such a tube would need, as Hammer himself conceded, a small army of skilled glass-blowers. Such a labor-intensive solution was economically unfeasible. Nor was GE about to make huge investments in automated manufacturing equipment. Especially not at a time when its fully-amortized light bulb production lines were still profitable. It would be twenty years before Chinese labor costs made Hammer’s idea practicable. Meantime, the spiral CFL would be a laboratory curiosity, gathering dust on the shelf. Still, the need to save energy remained pressing. Especially after the second oil crisis, which was triggered by the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Philips introduced the SL-18, the world’s first commercial compact fluorescent lamp, t
he following year. It featured a much simpler design than Hammer’s spiral: two U-shaped tubes stuffed into a prismatic glass housing. The lamp’s base housed a miniature magnetic ballast in its screw fixture. Engineering triumph though it may have been, from a consumer point of view there was much to dislike about the SL-18. For one thing, the lamp was ungainly and outsized. Weighing in at a hefty half a kilogram (just over a pound), it looked and felt according to one contemporary critique “like a can of beans.” The lamp was too large for many traditional sockets and too heavy for others, its bulk making some fixtures unstable. For another, the lamp was also too expensive, costing around 16 times the price of an incandescent equivalent. Supporters countered that, with a lifetime of 5,000 hours, the SL-18 lasted five times as long as an incandescent light bulb. To emphasize the point, Philips branded the lamp Marathon.11 The compact fluorescent lamp consumed less than a fifth as much power (18 watts versus 100) as an incandescent light bulb. In terms of running costs this was, Amory Lovins enthused, “not a free lunch, but a lunch you are paid to eat.” Users would save $30 over the life of the lamp — “money in the bank.” But consumers were not accustomed to choosing their light bulbs based on lifetime cost. All they saw was a sticker inscribed with a price that was shockingly high.