QUESTION:
Are the manufacturing and/or the importing of incandescent light bulbs going to be illegal starting in 2012?
ANSWER: "Yes" and "No".
Unless the law gets repealed or groundbreaking new technology emerges besides the the GE High Efficiency Incandescent (HEI) which it promised and failed to deliver by 2010, the answer is “yes” for general use 100 Watt incandescents in 2012, and "yes" for 75 and 60 Watt bulbs by 2014, but “no” for many types of other incandescent bulbs even after 2014.
I think the answer will lie in some type of technological breakthrough such as hybrid electric lamp technology being developed by scientists at the University of Rochester. This new technology nearly doubles the efficiency of an incandescent lamp by blackening the tungsten filament with a short pulse laser. We need something besides CFL's because the consumer market is waking up and complaining.
In any case, I'll review this confusing and poorly written law and what it all means in more detail in this tutorial.
