The gov't never mandated the use of CFLs, they made the manufacture and sale of lower efficiency bulbs illegal and left it up to the market to fill in the gaps, even halogen bulbs are still allowed but they are expensive, and don't last as well as the incandecents did while only having a little better effeciency. 60w incandecent = 43w halogen = 13w CFL = 8.5W LED
Would we be using primarily LEDs today if the govt had not mandated they stop the sale and manufacture of low efficiency bulbs?
There is a big difference in usability between the CFLs and LEDs, CFLs are dim at startup and then warm up and aside from CCFLs (not a typo) can't stand rapidly switched installs like signs and motion switches and afaik they still don't handle dimming well.
LEDs suffer from none of those issues, neither did incandecents, LED bulbs are a very visible upgrade from CFLs.
Put a modern led and an incandecent side by side and most people can't tell the difference by the light output, with some of the newer ones you can hardly tell even by looking directly at them.
IMHO we only ended up going with CFL because LED wasn't ready at the time, in some cases CFL is still not ready as you can't readily buy higher wattage (like 300w equivilent) LEDs while you can CFLs.
Still I think we would have ended up here eventually on a cost basis but without the low efficiency bulbs ban I think it would have taken much longer.
Same sort of issue with my home heating here,
~2005ish heat pump with LP aux heat, heat pump doesn't work below about 30F which ends up being most of the winter nights here.
Just the hardware costs to replace both units would be something like $24K.
Luckily LP is about as cheap to run as a decent heat pump when bought in bulk or at least it is right now.
At work we have a unit on NG and a unit on resistive electric, the resistive electric costs about 4x more to run than the NG but again many thousands to replace.
My rough estimate was that switching both units over to a modern heat pump that works in below freezing temps would save a bit over $1K/yr so looking like a minimum of 24 years for break even assuming the install was free, switching the electric unit over to NG would save about $650/yr so like 7 year break even.
NG is cheap per therm but has year round charges that make it total out at 3/4 the cost of electric;
1 year of electric heat costs $850
1 year of NG heat and service charges costs $610
but the cost for the NG alone is just $202
Yeah i'm sure the prices will come down eventually but right now the tech is often cost prohibitive even though it's cost effective long term.
It's something you would consider for a new install or a replacement for a failed unit but isn't usually considered worth replacing a working existing unit that's already paid for.
Solar's in much the same spot but IIUC solar has gotten so cheap that the installation makes up the majority of the cost now.