Power company Genesis is preparing to launch a petition calling for a ban on incandescent light bulbs, reviving an idea that New Zealand governments have picked up and put down before.
Genesis chief revenue officer Stephen England-Hall told RNZ the company wanted the old technology phased out because more efficient lighting would trim power bills right across the country. “One dollar of electricity buys you 250 hours of LED lighting, but it also will buy you 25 hours of incandescent bulb lighting, so it’s 10 times better to have LED bulbs than incandescent bulbs,” he said.
He put the potential saving in plain household terms. “The average house has roughly 15 light bulbs in it, so if you switch from one to the other, you’ll save yourself $300 a year in electricity costs,” he said.
The pitch is that a small change carries an outsized payback. “It doesn’t require, you know, radical re-invention of electricity markets. It just means get rid of inefficient technology and use more efficient technology, and everybody saves money,” England-Hall said.
New Zealand has been here before. A phase-out of the old bulbs was proposed back in 2008 under the Labour government of the day, only for the incoming National government to scrap the plan later that year after a backlash over what critics branded a nanny-state move. Consumer NZ called for a ban more than a decade ago and never got one. What is different this time is that the push is coming from a large electricity retailer rather than a regulator or a minister.
Genesis is one of the country’s big gentailers, a company that both generates power and sells it to households, so its interest in how people use electricity is not purely charitable. The wider backdrop is a run of sharp increases in power prices that has put the sector under political pressure. The Electricity Authority has already asked power companies to explain their price rises, and it is bringing in rules that would stop gentailers favouring their own retail arms on price or other terms when they sell the electricity they generate.
England-Hall said banning old bulbs was only one of several easy wins available to households, and that a lot of the savings come from shifting when power is used rather than how much. “If you can delay your start to your dishwasher or washing machine or your dryer until evening off-peak times, and you’ve got a day-night plan, you will save money on your power bill,” he said.
He pointed to a Genesis trial that moved hot water heating away from the morning peak. “We’ve done a trial on that at Genesis over the last year, had 17,000 customers participate in that and the amount of energy saved in moving morning peak hot water heating to a different time of day was enough electricity to power 2000 households,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like a lot at an individual customer level, but collectively, it’s a big impact and the customer didn’t notice that the hot water had been heated at a different time.”
Genesis research found most people were already hunting for ways to spend less on energy, with 79 percent actively looking and only 4 percent not looking at all. Younger New Zealanders were the keenest. Interestingly, when asked what changes they thought would help, the most common answers were driving less, combining trips and using public transport, rather than the quieter fixes around lighting and appliance timing that England-Hall was talking up.
He argued the biggest single saving for many households sits in the driveway. “A dollar of electricity takes you 17-18km in an EV, versus a dollar of diesel taking you three or four kilometres,” he said. That message lands at a moment when buyers are already moving, with electric and hybrid vehicles hitting record sales in June as petrol registrations slid.
The long-run argument, England-Hall said, is that electrifying more of daily life spreads the fixed costs of the network across more usage and lowers the unit price for everyone. “The more of the economy we electrify, ironically, the unit costs get socialised and so you end up with a much more efficient energy system that’s much more secure, that over time lowers the energy costs for everybody,” he said.
For now the ban is just a petition, and a petition is a long way from a law. The last attempt to switch off the incandescent bulb was killed by a change of government, and any new phase-out would need Wellington to decide the savings are worth the political heat of telling people what to screw into their light fittings.
What do you think, should New Zealand finally ban the old light bulb, or is it a decision best left to households? Share your view in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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