Consumers are too stupid to make good choices

[Quark]

I'm not sure how that works. Don't you get charged for all of your energy use, whether it's from your lightbulbs or your heater? How does that pawn it off on someone else?

-Jester

I'm not talking about charging for electricity, but rather overall efficiency of the system.

If you're using heat based of electric resistance (which is essentially what an incandescent bulb ends up doing), you're consuming electricity to produce heat. That electricity came from some other source on its own - oil, coal, gas, nuclear fission, etc - that on its own is not truly efficient.

So you take some oil and convert it to electricty (~34% for the old to ~48% for the new) and then have a bulb produce heat for you (~90%), you're looking at about 30% of the inherent energy of oil being used for heat.

Or, you have an oil heater which at ENERGY STAR level compliance is at least 83% efficient for a new one.