General Electric Phasing Out Compact Fluorescent Light In Favor Of LEDs

With every improvement that General Electric has made on the light quality of its LEDs, it seems like the industrial juggernaut was pushing its fluorescent lights closer and closer into the darkness. The company said Monday that it will stop making and selling the bulbs in the United States by the end of the year.

Today ~15% of consumers have tried LED; by 2020 more than 50% of residential sockets in the U.S.will be LED, while CFL spirals will decline by 3x over the next few years.

Customer that have a preference for fluorescent light bulbs will be able to pick them up through the year and likely into 2017 as the company goes through its stock of them. They became known as “Gore bulbs” for their purported efforts to reduce energy consumption, and have become either an important step toward making homes more energy efficient or a sure sign of government overreach.

It earlier moved away from the incandescent light bulbs invented by Thomas Alva Edison, GE’s founder. The CFLs were never really popular, GE said, as consumers complained that the light they gave was too harsh and that the bulbs’ usefulness was limited.

Strainic told the Times that LEDs accounted for five percent of the lighting market in 2014 and tripled to 15 percent of bulb shipments during the third quarter of 2015, as reported by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. CFLs represent about 27 percent of the market, with a falling share, the story says. Ikea abandoned CFLs and started carrying only LEDs previous year. There has been wider acceptance of CFLs elsewhere, especially in Europe, Mexico and other parts of Latin America.