Best again!
Best again!
A year ago the world's most successful CFL program (in terms of customer participation rates) was a lease-sale program on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, ran by the French national utility Electricité de France (EDF) (see IAEEL 2/92, A Caribbean Success Story). EDF has made it to the top again.
In the first 15 weeks of 1993, EDF ran a residential CFL program on the nearby island of Martinique. Through the campaign, EDF managed to get load-growth to almost level off.
EDF offered electronic 15W CFLs by sending out rebate-coupons to all residential customers. Each household could use their coupons to get two, four, or six lamps from retailers on the island. No initial payment was required. Instead, EDF charged for the lamps on the following six bills (1.5 years), at a heavily reduced price of 76 French francs (~$13).
The results are impressive: According to Ademe, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, half of the 110 000 households responded to the offer. Moreover, virtually every responding household chose to buy the maximum of six lamps. 350 000 lamps were sold through the program, including additional sales outside the program. EDF claims that they achieved an evening-peak-load reduction of ~7MW.
On Martinique, only six lamps per household were offered, compared with 10 on Guadeloupe. According to Ademe, the offer was limited to six CFLs because the assumptions as to how many lamps a household will operate at one time had been too optimistic for the Guadeloupe program. Consequently, the projected load reduction had never been achieved there.
Another difference between the programs was the price of 76 FF, which was 13FF less than the price on Guadeloupe. Osram had delivered all lamps to the Guadeloupe program (at that time Osram was the only manufacturer that could deliver the large quantity of lamps that EDF required). This time, the 350 000-lamp order went to Philips' French subsidiary Mazda, who sells the Philips electronic CFL under the product name Eureka 2.
Nils Borg