Why is reducing your lighting energy consumption so important?

Lighting is used for entertaining, cooking, grooming, cleaning, safety at night, ambiance, driving at night, looking in a drain pipe for that lost piece of jewelry, or countless other things. Light sources come in many different forms from the kerosene lanterns used in rural villages all over the world to the high powered street lights used on the highways we drive on.

Any way we look at it, the incandescent light sources we have used for so long are extremely inefficient, and the energy consumed by lighting is responsible for more than 22% of the energy consumption in the United States alone. Lighting is an energy source that we have the ability to control and reduce with simple changes. These simple changes start with one person and take very little effort at all. Take this educated statistic in for example:

If everyone in America who lives in a home changed out just five high-use incandescent light fixtures or the bulbs in them with ones that have earned the Energy Star rating, each family would save about $60 every year in energy costs, and together we'd save about $6.5 billion each year in energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions from more than 8 million cars. (from Energy Star) Everyone can make a difference!

New Energy Star CFLs emit better light

Most people remember fluorescent lighting and compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) as draining blue gray office light that sucked all the energy out of you. The problem is that those original fluorescent light sources were so efficient that that theory lasted as long as the lamps did. Most of these older fluorescent energy efficient lamps have a higher Kelvin temperature in the high 4000Ks resulting in a blue toned, harsh and bright light output. Most incandescent (most inefficient light source outside of fire) lamps have a warmer 2500K to 2800K producing a more intimate light output.