O que parece ser uma boa notícia

EDP vai oferecer lâmpadas economizadoras por todo o país: A EDP apresentou esta sexta-feira o seu programa de acção para a promoção da eficiência no consumo de energia que vai decorrer durante este ano. Entre as medidas incluídas neste plano está a distribuição de mais de meio milhão de lâmpadas economizadoras por todo o país às famílias portuguesas.

é afinal só para parte do país?
EDP investe 10 milhões na promoção da poupança: Entre as iniciativas previstas já a partir de hoje, destaque para a distribuição porta a porta de 500 mil lâmpadas economizadoras.
A EDP avisará com antecedência, através de um folheto informativo, quais as regiões do país que serão visitadas pelas suas equipas.

Mas a medida descrita pela EDP Comercial é esta e não fala de ofertas (o negrito é meu): "Promover a aquisição, no sector doméstico, de mais de 500.000 lâmpadas eficientes (CFLs), com vista a transformar o mercado no sentido da opção mais eficiente do ponto de vista do consumo energético".

Ainda sobre as CFLs, é bom ler isto para entender melhor a bondade da "oferta":
So what are the disadvantages of CFLs over the traditional bulbs we will no longer be allowed to buy? Quite apart from the fact that the CFLs are larger, much heavier and mostly much uglier than familiar bulbs - and up to 20 times more expensive - the vast majority of them give off a harsher, less pleasant light.

Because they do not produce light in a steady stream, like an incandescent bulb, but flicker 50 times a second, some who use them for reading eventually find their eyes beginning to swim – and they can make fast-moving machine parts look stationary, posing a serious safety problem – the so-called "strobe effect".

CFLs cannot be used with dimmer switches or electronically-triggered security lights (see package label, illustrated below), so these will become a thing of the past. They cannot be used in microwaves, ovens or freezers, because these are either too hot or too cold for them to function (at any temperature above 50C or lower than –18C they don't work),

More seriously, because CFLs need much more ventilation than a standard bulb, they cannot be used in any enclosed light fitting which is not open at both bottom and top (such as the type illustrated) - the implications of which for homeowners are horrendous.

Astonishingly, according to a report on "energy scenarios in the domestic lighting sector", carried out last year for Defra by its Market Transformation Programme, "less than 50 percent of the fittings installed in UK homes can currently take CFLs".

In other words, on the government's own figures, the owners of Britain's 24 million homes will have to replace hundreds of millions of light fittings, at a cost upwards of £3 billion. Not only is this an unwelcome cost, but the time scale of two years to replace as many as 60 million light fittings is wholly unrealistic.

In addition to this, low-energy bulbs are much more complex to make than standard bulbs, requiring up to ten times as much energy to manufacture. Unlike standard bulbs, they use toxic materials, including mercury vapour, which the EU itself last year banned from landfill sites – which means that recycling the bulbs will itself create an enormously expensive problem.

Perhaps most significantly of all, however, to run CFLs economically they must be kept on more or less continuously. The more they are turned on and off, the shorter becomes their life, creating a fundamental paradox, as is explained by an Australian electrical expert Rod Elliott (whose Elliott Sound Products website provides as good a technical analysis of the disadvantages of CFLs as any on the internet).

If people continue switching their lights on and off when needed, as Mr Elliott puts it, they will find that their "green" bulbs have a much shorter life than promised, thus triggering a consumer backlash from those who think they have been fooled.

But if they keep their lights on all the time to maximise their life, CFLs can end up using almost as much electricity from power stations (creating CO2 emissions) as incandescent bulbs – thus cancelling out their one supposed advantage.

In other words, in every possible way this looks like a classic example of kneejerk politics, imposed on us not by our elected Parliament after full consultation and debate, but simply on the whim of 27 politicians sitting round that table in Brussels, not one of whom could have made an informed speech about the pluses and minuses of what they were proposing.

There was not a hint of democracy in this crackpot decision, which will have a major impact on all our lives, costing many of us thousands of pounds and our economy billions – all to achieve little useful purpose, while making our homes considerably less pleasant to live in.

Such is the price we are now beginning to pay for the "eco-madness" which is sweeping through our political class like a psychic epidemic, The great "Euro-bulb blunder" is arguably the starkest symbol to date of the crazy new world into which this is leading us.

[act.: Is This Really a Bright Idea? The assumption is that by banning the incandescents everyone will simply switch over to the compact flourescents and thus Gaia will be appeased and the planet saved.]