Many of us may have heard Hari Bansha Acharya and Madan Krishna Shrestha’s radio skit, in which an enlightened consumer explains why his electricity bill has been so drastically reduced – because he uses compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs![break]
The adverts ran relentlessly, coinciding with a CFL promotion campaign launched by the NEA last August and extended till this March. As part of the pilot project, households consuming 20 kWh or less per month were given a CFL for free while others could take advantage of a ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ scheme and a tax break. One publication house eventually bandwagoned the burgeoning trend, with its own promotion of free CFLs for annual subscribers, posturing images of clay money-pots and twirled bamboo lights. More recently, the Asian Development Bank approved funding for a scaled-up version of the campaign to distribute one million CFLs targeted at domestic consumers in all electrified areas. This should reduce annual electricity consumption by 23 GWh.
The campaign took advantage of a preexisting consumer familiarity with energy efficient lamps and appliances. Those who could afford to resort to more expensive sources of energy, such as invertors and solar panels, so as to compose ‘normal’ working days, were already impelled to reduce their squandering. Spurred by the NEA’s campaign, the market for CFLs has since grown exponentially – last year’s Electro Tech Fair being a perfect example of the proliferation, where CFLs were the most prevalent and advertised product.In demand
The initial pilot project was the result of a shift in focus to demand-side management (DSM) by the utilities agency, technical support for the reform provided by the World Bank. Following transitions to DSM from a supply-side focus observed in other countries during times of crisis – the 1970s energy crisis, the more recent gas crisis in Bangladesh – unsustainable load shedding led to a focus on changing the behavior of end users.
“The typical engineering response would be to increase supply so as to satisfy growing demand, for example, by building a new power plant. Instead, we tried to look at ways of conserving energy,” says Michael Haney, Senior Energy Specialist at the World Bank.
“Previously, the NEA did not know what people were using their electricity for,” Haney points out. A load analysis found that domestic consumption of NEA-supplied electricity was disproportionately high in Nepal (68 percent of maximum demand), whereas industries rely on other sources of energy such as generators. And lighting accounts for the largest chunk of domestic consumption, at 45 percent. The analysis allowed them to come to the conclusion that lighting was actually important. With this knowledge, recommendations were made to restructure tariff rates, standardize appliance efficiency, run awareness campaigns, replace magnetic ballasts of tube lights with more efficient electronic ballasts, and of course, replace incandescent lights with CFLs.
“DSM is a dynamic approach. Maybe in five years’ time, industries will reintroduce themselves to the grid system, and then new recommendations will have to be made,” Haney notes. A separate DSM unit is now being established at the NEA itself to adapt to such natural progressions. CFL promotion in Nepal, therefore, appears to be the result of a resource crunch, not a concern for environmental sustainability.
Lightsavers
With a national energy deficit of 450MW, the CFL program aims to benefit both the supplier, by easing load, and the consumer, by reducing their expenses. While the initial cost of a CFL bulb is generally eight to 10 times higher than the regular bulb, the NEA estimates a saving of 80 percent in the long run – replacing a 100 watt tungsten bulb with a 20 watt CFL saves the buyer Rs 840 over the life of a CFL. CFLs last ten times longer and produce more lumens per watt (more efficient) than incandescent bulbs.
“Assuming that 100,000 households use 10 lights each – a total of 1,000,000 incandescent lights of 60 watts each – this amounts to 10,000,000 of energy consumption every hour,” elaborates Resha Pia of the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre. Divide that number by 6, and you get the amount of energy saved if only CFLs were used in that golden hour. Although less significant in Nepal’s context, CFLs have also been globally propagated for their role in reducing carbon emissions, due to more efficient use of energy.
For Pia, however, Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), currently found in cars, traffic lights and solar tukis, not CFLs, are the future. But until LEDs can be made commercially viable for household use, CFLs should be the mainstay of the market.
“LEDs produce even more lumens per watt than CFLs, last longer, and don’t contain mercury. While they are still quite expensive and not as friendly on the eye, I expect that within the next five to six years local industry will have developed feasible models.” Till then, the next best, and most accessible, alternative is CFLs.
Evaluating success
While the pilot is considered a success, a saturated market has been a primary cause for concern. Seated at his desk in the NEA, where no lamp fixtures have been left unscrewed and exchanged for their more-desired version, Chiranjibi Sharma Poudel, Director of Technical and Commercial Services, makes it a point to prologue the interview with an unsolicited assurance that the NEA is advancing to implementing proper certification and labeling procedures.
“There are many brands available in the bazaar, both quality and non-quality. We haven’t yet reached the optimal level of oversight to support good quality brands.”
If standards are not regulated promptly, consumers, whose primary instinct is to buy the cheaper CFL, will become frustrated and disillusioned by bulbs that don’t last as long nor save as much energy and money as propagated.
However, what is left out of this picture is that the lack of oversight and foresight has led to neglect in another, more problematic, regard – checks on the mercury levels in each bulb, and establishment of proper disposal mechanisms. Influenced by an urgency to reduce demand rather than to be more environmentally friendly (the principal argument used by proponents of CFLs), the NEA has not accounted for the environmental impact of haphazard disposal of CFLs.
Good questions
The amount of mercury in a CFL ranges from 1 mg to upwards of 13 mgs. If broken, bulbs emit harmful amounts of mercury into the air, soil and water – more than 166 times the safe threshold – which, when inhaled or ingested, can cause damage to the central nervous system, the endocrine system and various organs of the body. Many cities have mandated that CFLs be disposed of in special hazardous waste facilities so as not to contaminate landfills. Unfortunately, no such system exists in Nepal as yet, the natural response to inquiries regarding this being “Good question”, “I don’t know”, “This is currently being looked in to”, and “That will be part of the next phase.”
“The natural agency to do recycling would be the utility agency,” Haney concurs. Yet, neither the NEA nor its partner organizations, or the Ministry of Environment, or the municipalities – nor those selling enterprises, either – have any knowledge of what exactly happens to CFLs once past their initial purchase. The most likely answer comes from garbage collectors, who classify all bulbs as ordinary glass, selling it at Rs 20 per kilo to private middlemen. Whatever isn’t sifted out probably releases toxins in our landfills, whatever breaks in the process probably releases toxins in situ, and all else is probably dealt with (or not) at the recycling factories in India.
While CFLs are not the only forms of hazardous waste – batteries and tube lights being just a few other examples of this – one could argue that the benefits of implementing a large-scale CFL distribution campaign are outweighed by major environmental costs of not taking a lifecycle approach to project implementation, that includes educating consumers on the risks of not recycling and providing for outlets for them to do so.
Let us hope that planning for the scaled-up campaign is in its formative phase, and there is still time to do this.
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