Learning From Light Bulbs
Posted September 8, 2010 at 8:49 pm 
Filed in: Later this month, according to the Washington Post, General Electric will close the last light bulb factory currently operating in the United States. According to GE, the shutdown is a result of the transition from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulb which was mandated in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and which we have written about before.
The Post story notes that CFLs were invented in the United States years ago as an efficient alternative to traditional incandescent lights. Their manufacture, however, is labor intensive, because the bulbs must be coiled, a process that cannot be fully automated and therefore requires significant manual labor. Unfortunately, that labor is generally more expensive in the United States than abroad, and the manufacture of CFLs is dominated by China, with a substantial portion of the blubs the product of a single company.
The article observed that “going green,” and adopting innovative technology does not always mean creating new jobs here at home and that the administration’s efforts to develop a green economy is fighting the long term trend of declining manufacturing jobs in the United States.
This can provide something of a lesson with respect to the manufacture of grid enabled vehicles. Much of the technology embedded in GEVs was developed in the United States, and the United States clearly is one of the largest markets for such vehicles. Yet, it we are not careful, it represents another segment of the manufacturing economy that we could lose to foreign competition. To the extent that GEVs evolve towards traditional electronic products, concern that that process might occur could be heightened, as most of the manufacture of electronics has migrated to Asia over a period of several decades.
The risk is heightened because the Europeans and Chinese may be moving more quickly towards the adoption of GEVs than the United States, the Europeans because gasoline is more expensive making GEVs more cost competitive, and the Chinese because they see it is an important technology in the future and the government is promoting its pursuit as a matter of policy.
We have made investments here too, including significant ones in batteries and infrastructure as part of the stimulus bill. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. The auto industry and the internal combustion engine have untold dollars of embedded capital, a society that is built around vehicles that are easily and quickly refueled and 100 years of history. If we do not have a well thought out deployment strategy, these vehicles will not succeed in the marketplace, at least at first. The problem is that if their adoption is delayed by a decade because of bad planning while other key economies move forward, we will lose. Not only because of a delay in their deployment and the delay in mitigating the risks of oil dependence, but it seems likely that if deployment in the United States is delayed, the manufacture might be as well. And then we might be too far behind our economic competitors, left to import from them technology that we helped develop – again.
So, perhaps our experience with light bulbs can remind us that simply moving to a green economy and adopting transformative technology does not guarantee that we can keep the new green jobs here at home. Careful thought and planning may be needed as well. Let’s keep that in mind as Congress considers policies to promote GEVs.
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