Protecting Healthy Light Bulbs

We have filed a Petition with the US Dept. of Energy to create a protected product class of "General Wellness Light Bulbs"

Readers of this Substack newsletter will know that healthy light bulbs face an existential threat. On June 25, 2028, a new so-called “energy regulation” comes into effect which will ban all light bulbs unless they can meet an elevated lumens per watt minimum rating. For the typical A-19 light bulb this minimum is 125 lumens per watt.

Conventional static blue-pump LEDs, which comprise over 90% of light bulb sales, can easily meet this new 125 lumens per watt standard. However, these conventional LED light bulbs deliver “junk light”, as dangerous to our health as “junk food”, with a narrow artificial spectrum with no violet, a blue spike night and day, and low levels of red content, and no infrared.

Healthy Light Bulbs Cannot Meet the New Standard

But as Table 1 below shows, light bulbs designed with healthy light spectra cannot meet this new standard. They typically range between 47 and 90 lumens per watt. This includes circadian-friendly light bulbs with sky blue-rich day light and zero blue evening light, full spectrum day lights, infrared-rich lights, and red and amber lights for nocturnal use.

Table 1: Examples of healthy light bulbs that will be unable to meet the new US Department of Energy standard that becomes effective in 2028

The Fallacy of Measuring Energy Efficiency in Lumens Per Watt

This ridiculous situation, where healthy light bulbs are banned and only unhealthy light bulbs are permitted, has occurred because the US Department of Energy is using an archaic 100-year-old metric to determine energy efficiency. Lumens mostly measure just the yellow and green wavelengths associated with the perception of brightness. The generation and emission of other wavelengths that are critical to human health are treated as wasted watts.

The Petition Has Been Filed

On March 31, 2025, over 200 Americans submitted a formal petition for rulemaking to the US Department of Energy (DOE) to create a protected class of "General Wellness Light Bulbs" (including circadian-friendly, infrared, & full spectrum) that is exempt from the 125 lumens per watt rule.

The full text of the Petition can be found at https://circadianlight.org/doe-petition/

Please sign up to receive updates so that you can respond when this proposal becomes open for public comments.

Further Resources

For more remarkable insights into what we have done to ourselves by moving indoors and switching on narrow spectrum blue-rich LED lights, see my book THE LIGHT DOCTOR.

Remember the light we see is as important our health as the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.