The Last Frost

Freaking cool. Wal-Mart the uber-mega-huge-shopping-chain we all hate to love is doing something good for our planet. They aim to sell every one of their customers, 100 million in all, at least 1 compact fluorescent light bulb. The effect that 100 traditional light bulbs replaced with these CFL's would make on the power grid would be massive. This means less greenhouse gases pumped into our atmosphere. If any company could set a goal of getting just one bulb into every american household it would be Walmart, afterall they are the world's largest corporation, and the largest corporation in world history.

So what kind of an effect would this have if they prove successful? According to FastCompany.com, "…if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people"

That's enough to power San Francisco, twice over, with some to spare.

Who will this hurt though? The manufacturers of traditional light bulbs. CFL's last much longer than traditional bulbs, meaning people won't need as many. The effect could be devastating for the traditional incandescent industry. Again, something Wal-Mart is good at. In my opinion though, traditional light bulbs are so 20th century. I love T. Edison, but man, couldn't we have improved on his invention just a little? Look how far we took the Wright Bros. concept, we flew to the moon! Yet we still light our houses with the same old technology around since the turn of the 20th century. 

Wal-Mart Aims To Sell 100 Million Compact Fluorescents In One Year » [Treehugger]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 10:05 am and is filed under Conservation, Energy, Latest News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.