关于所谓“节能产品”成本的进一步分析和评判。To identify an “energy-saving product”, it is common among industries and users to assume that a New Product is better. In fact, all products have their costs and environmental impacts through their lifetime: manufacture process, technology development, production, marketing, distribution, application, maintenance, retire, disposal and recycling, etc., all these processes need consume materials, natural resources, energy ; generate polluting emission and exhausts. Directly or indirectly these sums up as products’ cost or price. Some energy-saving new devices are expensive, it must have been spending high costs in above processes. Thus not quite energy-saving eventually.

(1) Cost impacts span through a product’s lifetime (time): For example, LED lighting products’ higher price is determined by three cost factors: (1) The investment is high: semiconductor process technology’s front R&D process plus its expensive capital equipment eats up a lot of upstream consumption and front-end capital; (2) The production costs are high: materials, energy, natural resource and manpower consumptions are high; a sophisticated multiple-layer supply chain industry needs to build up and already shown surplus, inventory and logistic issues; extra dispose and cleaning of exhausts a expensive. Common in semiconductor industry; (3) Product assembly of after-use devices, demolish other light-source industry, added costs are not addressed yet. (3) Still the LED devices, with 100LM per discrete component will need an array of hundreds to achieve each practical intensity lighting, that made optimal optical design impossible, cannot make flood parallel lighting, and added complications in assembly, increased failure rate and reduced reliability.

LED lights are usually made up of 10-100 times in numbers of parts comparing to a single light bulb. Actually, LED component, when assembled into an integrated lamp, is not as good as conventional products (such as light bulbs, tubes and flood lights in controlled quality and sustained life-time. An user would expect to use out 3 years of LED light’s reliable period, to “pay back” the “debt” (front cost of consummations) using savings of electric bills; Then he gets-even ecumenically in the competition (equivalent to if he did not replace the obsolete light bulb with the LED through 3 years). Later started to get real savings, but the LED used through 3 years has decayed its performance and new LED lights shows improvement sot that it is time to replace it again. Do we have LED proven with: (1) lower costs in maintenance and longer endurance; (2) low replacement cost; (3) thrifty and environment-friendly disposal of old products? In the meantime while populate LED lighting, we also need to have low-cost solutions to retire and demolish manufacturing capacity and infrastructure of obsolete lighting products. If we don’t populate with the new device, otherwise they have still producing, making money and in normal depreciation., thus saving a lot of costs. 3 years ahead after LED has installed, it becomes just a relatively bad light. It is really bad if count in a factor our eyesights have had enough demand due to the glare and defect spectrum that LED lighting introduced into our lives.

(2) Cost impacts of a product’s life-span crossing geological territories (space): For example, the same as semiconductor solar cell products, the competition is not about who is manufacture the products and making more money; it is about where to divide pollution effects. On the manufacture site, it increases the use of local natural resources, materials, energy, environment cleaning and manpower (China); while on the users side in Western markets, it reduces the use of electricity thus protected nature resource and environment. In this case we hope the profit that China earned from Western countries shall have been dedicated to compensate, make up of fix local damages of resource and environment (if natural resources and environment do have means to reverse or fix). Or the originally thought selling products now becomes selling local resources for profit, and then gets paid to destroy local environment.

Such a new product is yet another fall to our industrialized society’s routine of stimulation the productivity growth. It has nothing to do with saving and cleaning. Not only in ecosystems, but also in macro economy the new product’s claimed function has eventually been taken off from a balanced equation.