Earth Hour

Earth Hour - http://www.earthhour.org/ (switch off lights and tvs for an hour).


I'm in favour of micro-most-things[0]. The argument that doing/not doing something because it won't solve the whole problem at once, or because it will only ameliorate a problem, has always seemed an indicator of laziness, covert greed, or stupidity.

Even if it doesn't actually achieve a great reduction in immediate energy consumption, Earth Hour seems a way of making people think. Living with students who have recently left home and halls was rather a shock: so many seemed unable to connect energy consumption with cost, let alone more remote concepts. Of course turning off lights and appliances for one hour a year won't make a big difference to CO2; but anything which makes people think, provided it does no harm, deserves support.

However, there are people claiming that Earth Hour is a Bad Idea because it will break the national grid. So far, I haven't seen any detailed reason adduced, just that "surges" are bad and that the national grid is designed for continuous production and drain. Surely it has storage capacity? How else would it deal with the kettle-on syndrome? What happened to Sydney's grid last year (apparently there was a 10% reduction)?

[0] except micro-management



[EDIT] In the opinion of a friend who works in the industry, it is indeed Bad. "Almost instantaneous load changes to power generation and distribution services are not a good idea." I'm not convinced that this demonstration would be widespread enough to do any damage, but his arguments on the difficulty of planning for a sudden lessening in demand look sound. More important from the point of view of using this as a demonstration in support of the environment is his comment that "It is also costly from an environmental point of view where return to a peak demand would probably initiate quick-start gas-turbine generation".



From another source: BERR has information on national grid management. The background in this PDF of the government response to Clause 18 (proposal for Dynamic Demand technology) implies that if there is a good estimate of the numbers in advance the risk is low, but it could result in cascading power failures and hardware damage.