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Halogen Torchieres: A Look at Market Transformation in Progress
Chris Calwell
Ecos Consulting, 1234 Silver Mesa Drive, 81301 Durango, Colorado, USA
Evan Mills
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, MS-90 3058, 947 20 Berkeley, CA, USA
ABSTRACT
The halogen torchiere, or uplighter, has enjoyed unprecedented success over the last decade as a residential fixture in North America and parts of Europe. Its high temperature halogen light source, while bright and attractive, consumes 300 to 500 watts of power, and has caused at least 189 fires in the United States alone. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency?s recent development of a voluntary label for energy efficient residential fixtures ?Energy Star ?has served as the foundation for a concerted effort to transform the market for torchieres and other residential fixtures. Electric utilities are now investing millions of dollars in incentive and promotional programs to encourage their customers to switch from purchasing cheap halogen torchieres to purchasing higher cost, higher value, Energy Star alternatives. The most successful marketing efforts for such products, while acknowledging the value of their energy savings, focus primarily on their non-energy benefits, such as improved safety.
The term ?market transformation? has seen widespread application to a series of initiatives to encourage the sale of more energy efficient technologies. In most cases, these initiatives are pursued by individual utilities, groups of utilities, or governments. The initiatives succeed or fail primarily on their ability to persuade consumers to buy a product on the basis of a single attribute: energy efficiency. While for some customers the energy metric can be decisive, for most it is merely a helpful piece of information not a factor that, by itself, moves them to purchase a particular product (Jennings, et al., 1996).
Recently, a number of researchers have begun exploring another dimension of these efficient technologies: their non-energy factors. Nutek?s technology procurement and market transformation programs, for example, have placed substantial emphasis on the low noise transmittance of windows, the quiet operation of refrigerators, the low-evaporation performance of clothes washers and dryers, and the lower heat output and longer life of high frequency-ballasted lamps, rather than solely addressing their energy consumption characteristics. By emphasizing non-energy factors shown to be important to target customer groups, Nutek achieved far greater interest from those parties in procuring efficient equipment. (Nutek, B1996:3, and 1994:70).
At the 1993 Right Light conference, one of the authors delivered a paper on this topic that identified the central importance of non-energy factors in consumer acceptance of compact fluorescent lamps (Wilms and Mills, 1993). It also demonstrated in some detail the poor correlation between lamp purchase price and sales for several countries. A subsequent paper explored, for a range of energy efficient technologies, the multiple dimensions of non-energy benefits, including improved indoor air quality, enhanced health and safety, improved acoustics, labor savings, improved process control, amenity/convenience, water savings, and indirect economic benefits through equipment downsizing. For energy efficient lighting, the commonly known non-energy benefits include lamp longevity, safety, the aesthetic advantages of diffuse light sources, and certain environmental advantages. This paper addresses the particular interactions between energy efficiency and safety in one specific light fixture type: the halogen torchiere, or uplighter. It traces the simultaneous rise of interest in improving the efficiency of the products and the growing awareness of their safety risks, showing how each factor interacted with the other to create demand for energy efficient, safer alternatives to the halogen torchiere in the U.S. market.
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