Philips Wins DOE’s $10 Million L Prize for 60W Incandescent Killer
4th August 2011
It’s taken three years to find a winner that could meet the high standards set forth by the DOE, specifically “ensuring that performance, quality, lifetime, cost, and availability meet expectations for widespread adoption and mass manufacturing.” Requirements further stipulated that the 60W incandescent killer use less than 10 watts of power, and provide energy savings of 83 percent.
August 4th, 2011 at 16:53
Cool. I guess the gubmint can, on occaision, provide stimulus for good, new ideas.
It remains to be seen whether the premium price for this bulb will be a net savings over the life of the bulb.
Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be like the Prius and other “green” vehicles, where the higher initial price is never actually recouped by the fuel savings over the life of the vehicle.
August 4th, 2011 at 18:19
Jerry Pournelle has been promoting the concept of “X-Prizes” for over a decade that I know of. He originally applied it to space travel, but then extended it to anything that the giverment thinks useful, as a market-oriented alternative to Funding A Bureaucracy.
August 4th, 2011 at 19:51
Yet did Purnelle have $10 million on offer to fund his “market-oriented alternative”?
It was the DOE, not Pournelle, which brought this crop to harvest.
As a confirmed capitalist, you know that one needs concentration of capital to bring products to market–and who has more capital than the Gub’mint?
August 4th, 2011 at 19:55
No, of course not. Don’t be obtuse. His thesis was “If the government is going to spend money on this sort of thing, this is they way they ought to be spending it, rather than they way they do it now.” Try to keep up.
August 5th, 2011 at 08:20
Ah, yes, Saint Pournelle the Visionary. I see.
But doesn’t that violate your principle of “I look at things as they never were and say–Woa! That was close.”