Here is a case study of many of the subjects we have been discussing here lately; e.g. energy, efficiency, competition, outsourcing:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/07/AR2010090706789.html How innovation killed the lights QUOTES: "By Peter Whoriskey Wednesday, September 8, 2010 IN 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. . . . 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. . . . If there is a green bandwagon, as Doyle says, much of the Obama administration is on board. . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . [GE] 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. . . ." And, to summarize the rest, Yan learned how to manufacture CFLs, set up production lines in China, and now manufactures about half of the total sold. The rest are also made in China. It seems no one in the U.S. ever set up a CFL production line! Yan now intends to set up a line in the U.S. The bulbs will cost an extra $0.40 but suppliers say that consumers will pay this for bulbs marked "made in USA." I guess I would, too. - Jed
