Even with new minimum federal lighting efficiency standards, energy efficient lighting products continue to offer a major opportunity to cost-effectively reduce household energy use over the next 8-9 years. As a result, high efficiency products offer an important role to assist New England and New York to realize the capture of all cost-effective energy efficiency as articulated in their policy goals and provide broad energy, economic and environmental benefits. To realize the full measure of cost-effective savings, efficient lighting products should continue to play a major role in residential energy efficiency programs across the region with the goal of full market transformation.
Maximize cost effective energy savings by the end of the decade by filling at least 90 percent of lighting sockets with an efficient light source (45 lumens/watt or greater). Doing so in New England and New York would reduce household lighting consumption by
47 percent and save on average 636 kWh per year or $111 per household. At the regional level, the cumulative annual savings by 2020 will amount to 43,800 GWH hours and cumulative first year demand savings of 837 MW, and reduce projected carbon emissions by over 25 million metric tons. The annual energy savings in 2019 would be equivalent to the energy usage of nearly 1.2 million households (Nine percent of the households in the Northeast). The demand savings is comparable to displacing more than two 500 MW combined cycle power plants at an assumed 75 percent capacity factor. Finally, the projected carbon emissions would equate to removing almost five million cars from the road for a year.
While efficiency Program Administrator (PA) costs to promote a broader range of new efficient lighting products will be higher than current programs costs, increased market adoption of a broader array of efficient products will provide significant costs savings compared to reliance on products that minimally meet new federal lighting standards – providing cumulative cost savings net of efficiency program incentive costs of over $6.8 billion through the end of 2019.
To achieve this transformation of the residential lighting market continued promotion of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and growing support of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting technology by the region’s efficiency program administrators, retailers and manufacturers is necessary. By the end of the decade the typical household will have a mix of CFLs, LEDs and linear fluorescent lamps. Figure ES-1 provides a projection of what the residential socket saturation of lighting technologies might look like.