Agreed, they think Mercury vapor is obsolete and inefficient. The government described itself there, therefore it should ban itself.

AGREE Lamp bans are STUPID---Politicians know NOTHING about lighting equipment!!!VOTE THOSE BUMS OUT!!!!

Politicians dont have to know anything about lighting(or many other speciality fields). Thats why they hire an group of experts from different fields to make a recommendation how things should go. Unfortunately those kind of groups are usually full of lobbyist and other people that are there to driver their own or their companys interests. And even the politician her/himself could be, let say a good friend of business or company. Thats not an unprecedented situation either.

You hit the nail (or bulb) on the head. All the politicians are bent on making a profit, and that coupled with their idioticness has helped extinguish the flame (or arc) of the Mercury vapor lamp and helped spread LEDisease.    Long live !

And there is the general pool of "hey hey ho ho western civ has got to go" commie types who see unreliable and untested modern rubbish as a way of bringing about collapse sooner as all that is needed is a choking of the supply of replacements when everything dies in a few years.  This is a good chunk of the reason behind the pushing of failure prone compact fluorescent lamps and now LEDs as well as other green crazy rubbish like destabilizing the electricity grid through loads of wind and solar and making all manner of electronics die fast with lead free solder and crappy components.

Draw a line between all the politician driven stuff and solar energy. The thing with the solar destabilising the grid is not true at all

The main thing I see wrong with LED lighting is the drivers. They are the main point of failure, with so many components likely to fail in a complex circuit, rather than a full wave rectifier/ cap circuit and a fine tuned transformer with the specs to run the LEDs based on their voltage, current, etc. And before anyone brings up the idea of "compact, minimalistic" ideas, I'm talking mainly about road lighting, where said transformer and rectifier/cap circuit can fit inside of a cobrahead, like an m250r2. Granted, they make LED lights that can be run off mains, but that technology, IMHO, seems sort of dodgy and would trip the breaker when failing/short to ground and be deadly (in extreme cases where housing/heat sink is ungrounded and becomes energized, whereas most of the decent drivers have built in fuses to prevent catastrophic failure.

The main problems i see with LEDs

1
Extreme blue peak vs eye strain :

The light of LEDs is white and is of high CRI, but in the blue end of the spectrum it is mediocre. The light contains a single and quite powerfull blue peak, which along with a single band from the phosphors form white light.... To compare, in all discharge sources, there are multiple cyan-blue-violet lines of lower output each - few from mercury, few more may be from phosphors or halides

Our eye is not at its best at seeing blue light, but it hit straight on the sensitivity peak of the blue cone cells. Result is, with the appreciable amount of light being what it is, and pupils tall open respectively, the cone cells are getting strained with the amount of monochromatic blue that comes in

With the blue light from discharge, there is no such concentrated peak - The blue light is spread over few peaks, none of which is extreme, and they are not extreme compared to the overall amount of light that affects the pupil size

I for one can feel this strain under LED light, and if i can feel it as strain, to me this means that it can lead to damage in long term exposure

2
Extreme blue peak vs Melatonin :

Our body produces a hormon called Melatonin, which presence among other stuff signs to the body to prepare sleeping and self recovery processes. The hormon production is stopped by seeing blue light

In nature, Sun and blue sky mean day, activity time, no melatonin. Fire and darkness mean night time, prepare to sleep and recover

You want to go out for a walk before sleep - And, there are LED ligths outside. The melatonin production drops, and you will sleep, but with some of the recovery processes possibly delayed a bit after exposure to the LEDs

3
GLARE!!!

The LEDs emit light into 2 pi sr solid angle (half sphere), compared to all other light sources that emit into 4 pi sr (full sphere)

The LED makers like to think that with the light emitted in one direction, optical control is better and they can make more precise optics

In reality, the "more precise optics" just mean that what was used to prevent glare with HID sources - wide reflectors actually taking care of the main beam, big prismatic refractors, ...... is gone

What you get is usually just the LED panel with a pathetic sheet of plastic lenses for directing the light, but for the viewer it is still an aray of blinding dots

In some better lantern designs, such as what is made by Philips and Gaash, there is actually a reflector, but the amount of light redirected by it is quite different from that of HID - so it is nowhere as effective at preventing the glare as it should be....

The result, either way, is incredibly glary lights

Those are problems with all LEDs out there, no exceptions, even the best ones



Reliability is for what i can say an issue of maufacture quality. I see here that LEDs from the "top of the line" companies do well without premature failures, while everything else starts going bad after just tiny fraction of the stated 100K hours life....

"Magnetic" transformers are the best for reliability, but they have to be quite heavy and expensive (lot of Cu and Fe in them) to be efficient. Thats not where LED lighting is aiming at....

First, the very same manufacturers pichu about how inefficient anything "magnetic" is when they talk about non-LED lighting. Would be weird if they use it themselfes at the same time

Second, they are all about making stuff "modern" and "slim" and "smart"

Third, the electronic is WAY cheaper to manufacture. LED lights cost a lot but it have very little to do with actual production costs, the LEDs are so profitable exactly since they dont cost much to make, but sell at huge markups due to being a "modern"/"smart"/etc product....

Wind and solar can disturb grid stability if they account for enough of the 'rated' grid generation capacity as they are intermittent sources of electricity.  Thus system operators must constantly vary the amount of electricity from other sources of generation in order to keep the system in balance, and this becomes impossible above a certain threshold.  According to the Danes a few years back, the maximum proportion of wind electricity that their grid could handle is about 15%, and that is with the rest of the European grid to dump excess electricity on.
Then there is the related problem of frequent cycling of conventional generating plants causing premature plant failure due to the constant heating and cooldown.

Wind is more of a fluctating source, but it can be used to power storage (pumping of water, distillation, ....) rather than the grid directly

Solar is stable, and is even more so than changing loads on the grid

Intermittent clouds can cause wild fluctuations in the amount of electricity generated.  I see this all the time with my solar farm.

The stability or at least predictability of each of these sources strongly depend on the region. If there is 320 days of the year clear sky, the solar output would be way more stable than with region with barely 100 days/year with clear sky.

In the environment of Central Europe the unpredictability is so, neither of these is really working to reduce the emission from the classic sources, because of the necessary readiness of the backup power capacity.
 It is just because of the government push, setting the selling price for solar sources about 5..10x the price of the peak stabilizing power (power generated on demand in minutes response to stabilize the network, the most expensive commodity on the electricity market) and the utilities are forced by law to first buy that power regardless if that means exporting the excess energy for negative prices, I guess it speaks for itself, what is the real technical value of that generation, mainly when most of the pollution here come from the grid stabilizing sources...

I would agree with these sources, even with some public aid but only when they would really compete with the traditional ones on the open market. If the market would buy that energy for at leas the price of the baseline generation, no problem. That will prove it works at least technically.
But the reality of the nature of these sources is, it needs allocation of very high regulation power (so the most expensive and polluting one) or extensive enforcement of the load management (forcing people to adopt their consumption towards the actual grid condition) to just keep the grid stable, so the selling price for the energy would have to be negative...

Solar :

Summing up panels over large area covered by a grid (not a single building/village/etc), clouds dont appear suddenly over all of them or disappear over all of them. Clouds flow and pass over area, so they can cover more or less panels, but the wider area of solar is integrated together, the more stable it is in overall

The actual load on the grid is not stable, and in some moments it have way worse fluctations than the solar :

 - Mass switching on and off of loads near round hours in morning and evening due to opening and closing of workplaces

 - Mass switching on and off of loads as people come home after work and switch everything on

 - Mass switching on of street lighting

 - Mass switching on of TV's in relation to a certain broadcast

 - Switching of large single industrial loads in big factories
....
....



Wind :

It may not be good idea to feed into the grid, but it may be great to directly power loads of some types, with the grid used for backup only :

 - Distillation plants. Distill with the rate the wind allows, then once in a while power up from the grid to complete the needed capacity of distilled water

 - Water pumping. Pump with the rate the wind allows and store above a dam, then release as needed or use the grid to complete the needed capacity

....
....

Also in all those loads, when powered from teh grid, the load can be varied to balance the grid according to the grid's needs, with just "completion" / "level off" periods to ensure the purpose that the load serves is fulfilled

But there are also proposed plans to overcome these instability probelems. Current options are I think building a massive powerbank and I think that has been already tested in smaller scale in some locations like village of Feldheim in Germany. Other one I have heard is to use battery capacity of electric cars as powerbank but I dont know if theres been any real life tests for that (sounds bit too complicated).

At some point there was also discussion about option that household would get electricity cheaper if they agreed to let powercompany possibility of disconnect for a shot time some loads like heating or boiler and it was emphasize that disconnection time would be so short that it would not be notable. 

The battery capacity required to make any difference on a grid scale is dragontype. Consider that batteries contain big quantities of toxic chemicals and have limited life, i'd not bet whether the battery plan makes more harm or good to the environment....

The best energy storage on such scale is by pumping it up and using it in Hydro, and solutions like that



Back in the early 80s we did have an early system of this type in Israel - a home have 2 service connections, one permanently powered and one switched on and off at the decision of the power company. In the beginning the system was implemented with the 2nd service being controlled by a locally installed time switch (with the time being set by the power company). The electricity rate in the 2nd connection was much lower than in the main

Eventually the system would be updated to online ripple control and such, but it never happened, it was abandoned later in the 80s - i dont know why. Today homes where the 2 service connections still exist, just get permanent power to both connections, with standard rates