"I think that for 2012, let's make 'lumen' the word of the year," said Adam Gottlieb, spokesman for the California Energy Commission in Sacramento. " When you buy a light bulb, you don't buy 100 watts. You are buying the amount of brightness it puts out."

The federal spending bill before Congress is a no-spending bill for the Energy Department... But the new standards for light bulbs — signed into law in 2007 — would remain in place, meaning the effort to stem the new rules might mean little at the end of the day.

The much-debated “phase-out” of incandescent light bulbs has struck a nerve with consumers and manufacturers alike recently, but the process began long ago, when the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 was passed into law.

The phase-out of inefficient bulbs starts in January 2012 with 100-watt bulbs that use too much energy.

LED light bulb prices the United States took the most drastic dip: the prices of LED light bulbs for 40W and 60W replacements dropped 3% and 10%, respectively.

For the first time, a majority of Americans now know that federal legislation will eliminate “most traditional incandescent lighting by 2014,” according to a new survey conducted by the lighting manufacturer Osram Sylvania.

For nearly 100 years, buyers have had mostly the same choice for lighting -- the standard incandescent bulb pioneered by Thomas Edison.

[Rose] DiNapoli said she was skeptical but welcomed the chance to work with the Lumen Coalition, using her own suburban Washington home as a test case, to find energy-saving alternative bulbs that would give light at least as good and hopefully better quality than the traditional bulbs she replaced.

Our tests of 26 compact fluorescents and 10 light-emitting diodes found that though the newest bulbs might not be perfect, they last longer and use less electricity than traditional incandescent bulbs, and many of the problems of earlier versions have been overcome.

New bulbs using halogen, compact-fluorescent and LED technologies have been sprouting up on store shelves recently.