The sale of incandescent bulbs may be banned after they are "retired" for 11 days
On November 14, 2011, the national development and reform commission and other five ministries and commissions issued the "roadmap for phasing out incandescent lamps in China", which planned to ban the import and sale of incandescent lamps of 15 watts or above for general lighting from October 1, 2016.
With less than a month to go, China's plan to phase out incandescent light bulbs is about to take its most important turn.
Due to some leeway left when the roadmap was released, whether to completely ban the import and sale of incandescent lamps still needs to be "adjusted according to the results of the mid-term evaluation". Therefore, it is expected that when the National Day comes, the relevant departments of the state may issue new policies to further clarify the elimination measures of incandescent lamps in the future.
China plans to 'retire' incandescent light bulbs in four years
The incandescent light bulb is the kind we know from a very young age that was invented by Edison. This prototype was created in 1879 and is now 137 years old. But what was then a great invention is now a work in progress. In fact, of all the lighting fixtures that use electricity, incandescent bulbs are the least efficient. Only about 2% of the electricity they consume is converted into light, and the rest is lost as heat.
Many countries around the world have phased out incandescent bulbs because of their low light efficiency. It was at the beginning of 2007 that the Australian government took the lead in announcing the comprehensive elimination of incandescent lamps in the form of legislation. A dozen countries and regions, including Canada, Japan, the United States, the European Union, South Korea and Taiwan, have successively released their plans for the elimination of incandescent lamps.
China is a big producer and consumer of incandescent lamps. It is estimated that China's lighting consumption accounts for about 12% of the total electricity consumption. China also issued a "roadmap for China to phase out incandescent lamps" in 2011.
In 2012 and 2014, China has eliminated 100+ watt and 60+ watt incandescent lamps for general lighting, which are currently in the mid-term evaluation period.
China's roadmap for phasing out incandescent light bulbs
But industry experts say the government and industry need to work together to fully implement the plan. In fact, the difficulty of moving ahead with the ban is largely because there is no real alternative to incandescent light bulbs. From this point of view, lighting enterprises to increase the investment in research and development of technology to produce a real energy-saving and cost-effective products can let incandescent lamp solid "retirement".
If all goes well, China's four-year "retirement" plan for incandescent lamps will enter a crucial stage next month, meaning all incandescent lamps above 15 watts will not be allowed to be produced or imported. The average incandescent lamp we use in our daily life is above 15 watts, which means that most incandescent lamps are about to say goodbye to us.
Replacing incandescent bulbs with leds is bound to be challenging
LED lighting is regarded as a promising future lighting technology in China. It is known that the cost of LED lighting in China is decreasing, and the penetration rate is also increasing. It is an inevitable trend that LED lights will replace incandescent lamps. It is estimated that the LED lighting market will reach 30.5 billion usd in 2016. Industry insiders say that China's urban lighting industry may witness a wave of LED lamp replacement in 2016, as the crucial time for incandescent lamp phase-out approaches and energy-saving lamps have been popularized for many years.
Industry analysts, with the full elimination of incandescent lights, LED as a green lighting new energy, will be fully popularized in the country. Compared with incandescent lamps and traditional energy-saving lamps, LED lamps have many advantages, such as high luminous efficiency, high energy saving, long life, green and environmental protection, and become the development direction of future lighting products. In recent years, the application of LED lighting is becoming more and more common. LED lighting equipment has been widely used in highways, schools and shopping malls of major cities in China.
However, from a few years ago, domestic enterprises began to rush into this field, regardless of whether lighting, electronics and other related enterprises have all set foot in LED lighting, eventually leading to the blue sea quickly turned into a red sea. At the same time, because the threshold of the industry is too low, many enterprises without technical strength produce products with low price as the main weapon, and eventually the price system of the whole industry will be pulled down rapidly, leading to the lack of money for most enterprises in the industry to earn or even lose money. LED lighting industry has even been called China's electronics industry is one of the fastest from hope to disappointment of the industry.
According to a data released by the national bureau of statistics in the second half of last year, among more than 2,600 LED lighting enterprises nationwide, 579 enterprises lost money in the first half of 2015, with a total loss of 1.215 billion yuan. This means that the loss of the whole domestic LED lighting industry is more than 20%, much higher than the loss of the national light industry, compared with the loss of the same period in 2014 is also expanded. In addition, according to the statistics of LED industry research institutions, the overall performance of the LED industry in mainland China was low last year. Take the LED packaging market for example, the size of that year was $8.8 billion, with a year-on-year growth of only 2%.
Facing the downturn trend of the whole industry, many large enterprises have quit the LED lighting industry in succession in the past two years, which reduces the intensity of competition in the market, but in fact, it is a big impact on the level of the whole industry. At present, many international lighting giants even abandon this field, including philips' spin-off and osram's sale of its lighting business. GE lighting also chose to leave the Asian market and stick to the European and American markets. Some industry insiders pointed out that although these giants are difficult to withstand the fierce competition in the Chinese market, it is hard to predict whether this is good or bad for China's lighting industry as a whole.
