On Friday, 9 March 2012, The Washington Post front page had a prominent article laying out a case for ridiculing the Department of Energy for awarding an “affordability prize” to a $50 light bulb. The article laid out how the bulb was so expensive to purchase and discussed how that purchase price would deter people from buying such an expensive bulb. The article, itself, focused solely on the “cost to buy” (that $0.99 sticker price) and paid no attention to the “cost to own” (how much it costs to buy, operate, repair, etc over life-cycle) (See: Cost-to-Own: A Societal Imperative).
The cost-to-buy vs cost-to-own comparison came in a large graphic (provided after the fold) that laid out that this $50 bulb would be the equivalent of 30 incandescent bulbs that would total $30. And, with counting electricity throughout lifecycle, the 30 incandescent bulbs would use 1800 kilowatt hours and the LED would use 300 kilowatt hours of electricity. According to the post, that electricity would cost $18 and $3 respectively, leaving 10 years of the incandescent at $48 total and 10 years of the LED at $53.
Okay, The Washington Post made it pretty clear: the “affordable prize winning bulb” would cost more to buy and cost more to own.
Oops … notice something. 1800 kWh for $18? That means 1 penny per kilowatt hour when, according to the Energy Information Administration, a more reasonable price is 11.8 cents per kilowatt hour placing that 1800 kWh at$212.40 and the 300 kWh at $35.40. With that, the ten year total cost of the LED bulb would be $85.40 and the series of incandescents would cost $242.40. Hmmm … in considering total ownership cost, an item not covered in the article, the LED lightbulb is about 1/3rd the cost of the incandescents it would replace.
A 3-to-1 return on investment, guaranteed, sounds pretty good to this investor after a decade of Wall Street battering.
When confronted with proof of its error, The Washington Post‘s reaction: removing the error from the graphic online without any indication in the online article nor on the graphic of the error and then editing. Saturday’s and Sunday’s paper: no comment as to the error. Earlier today, however, this graphic replaced the one that had been edited a la a 1984 revisionist history to remove evidence of The Post‘s error.
What does this show? Using 11 cents per kilowatt hour, below what Americans paid on average in 2011, spending $50 today on that LED lightbulb would lead to $145 in savings over a ten year period (with, as it notes, “based on the bulb being on a little more than eight hours a day”).
Sadly, that ownership cost analysis did not appear in the front page article’s discussion Friday.
Sadly, an incorrect graphic appeared in Friday’s paper.
Sadly, Washington Post editors decided to edit the graphic without any explicit statement as to it being an edited version to remove an error.
Sadly, The Washington Post has not yet taken action to inform its readership about this error.
Supposedly, Monday’s Washington Post will provide a correction. Questions to ponder:
- Will it appear prominently on the front page or be buried where few readers will see it?
- Will there be a discussion as to how the article mislead readers by not seriously discussing life-cycle costs?
- Will this failure to deal truthfully with energy issues in a front page article be dealt with forthrightly at The Washington Post or will they hide behind the ridiculous error in the graphic as if that were the only problem here?
On Friday’s article and the mistaken graphic, see A. Siegel’s Where’s the front-page correction? WashPost Fails Math, Fails Ethics, Fails Readers, Brad Johnson’s Right Wingers Attack Innovative $50 Light Bulb Because They Can’t Do Math, and Shauna Theel’s excellent dissection in The Washington Post‘s Bad Math Tarnishes Innovative Light which importantly points out that the entire premise of The Post article was wrong: this wasn’t a prize on affordability but a prize for technical achievement in improving LED lights.
This graphic quite prominently displayed in the front-page article’s continuation to page 4.
Note the difference between the life-cycle cost in that graphic compared to the graphic that is now online?