At Bethel Handyman Hardware, there are light-emitting diode -- LED -- light bulbs on the shelves. Not a lot, but some.

"We're just starting out,'' said store owner Ron Dufner. The bulbs are expensive now.

As the price comes down, and people start buying more, he'll offer more, he said. "But they are the future," Dufner said.

The state of Connecticut agrees. It's helping to lower the prices of these bulbs, with the hope more consumers will buy them.

"Right now, the push is on for LEDs," said Diane Duva of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

It's part of the effort to get people to stop using old-fashioned incandescent bulbs -- bulbs that waste a lot of energy through the heat they generate and that burn out fairly regularly.

In 2014, 40-watt and 60-watt bulbs will go off the shelves.

The first move away from incandescents was to compact fluorescent bulbs. They are much more energy efficient. But the first generation gave off a light that some people -- long accustomed to Edisonian brightness -- profoundly disliked.

Dufner said that prejudice lingers.

"But the compact fluorescents are much better than they used to be,'' he said. "There are some now that look just like incandescents.''

The problem with fluorescents is that they have mercury gas inside them. Once they burn out, you can't just throw them out in the trash. They should be recycled.

And Duva said, they didn't always work well with dimmers.

Enter LEDs. They don't have a filament like incandescents or a gas inside them like fluorescents, Instead they produce light by passing electrons through semi-conductor material.

Unless you live in a home with no electric appliances or computers and only hand-wound clocks, you already have LEDs in your home. They're the lights in the digital numbers of your bedside clock -- in any digital device. Collectively, may LEDs power large-screen TVs.

And you drive by them on any city street. LEDs are used in traffic lights today. Because they take so long to burn out, the cost of sending a crew to replace bulbs has been greatly reduced.

People have started buying strings of LED Christmas lights. If you're going to illuminate every shrub in the front yard, you might as well find a way to save money.

The next step is to use LEDs in your lamps. Duva said that they're as good as incandescents in lamps with dimmers. They give off a light that's closer to an incandescent as well.

The trick is to use subsidies to bring down the prices down. The state's two utilities participate in that program as part of their work to promote energy efficiency.

Ratepayers support it and other energy efficiency programs in the state with a very small charge on their monthly bills.

The less power used, Duva said, the less the utilities have to pay for the infrastructure to supply it.

And the less energy used to light a home, the less needed to produce it at some generator.

So it the future, when you walk into a hardware store and see a 60-watt LED bulb for about $7, know that the DEEP, the state Energy Efficiency Fund, and the electric utilities are behind that price. So are you, as a ratepayer.

And there's a good reason to change.

"They work better,'' Duva said.; 203-731-3345