Earth Hour
Tonight is Earth Hour, where you're supposed to turn off your lights from 8-9pm localtime.
jedipussytricks writes:
Subject: I don't get it.
What is Earth Hour supposed to accomplish?
My response:
I believe the main thrust of Earth Hour is:
a) to show how easy it is to just turn off lights you're not using,
b) to show how little actions can make a small difference, and
c) the reduction of carbon emissions (although I think this is a relatively new angle).
One of the first "Earth Hour" type activities was in Thailand where the Prime Minister asked people to turn their lights off - or more specifically, lights that they weren't actually using, like having the light on in the kitchen when you're in the living room - for an hour. He went on TV during this time and showed how much the load on the grid was reduced (i.e. demand) and the cumulative effect was greater than the power produced by one of their large power plants. Huge.
The context for this was that with an improving standard of living in Thailand, and amongst other things, many more air conditioners, the demand had increased to the point where they were looking at building another power plant. This was an attempt at teaching awareness and showing that little actions could make a big difference. I don't have time to do the research now, but I think that's one of the things that spawned the Earth Hour movement.
Something similar happened in California during the energy crisis: people were asked to turn UP their thermostats during the day when they weren't home to reduce the demand on the grid (less aircon), and to turn off their computers and lights and such. The alternative was to face rolling brown-outs. Throughout all of this though, I don't recall a "cause and effect" demonstration that "Look! Everyone turned their lights out during the day, and this meant we didn't have to do a blackout! Thanks guys!" I'm not sure if such an exercise would have proven useful, or if people would have just jumped right back into bad habits once the threat was gone again, but... *shrug*
Anyway, yeah, I think without comprehensive reporting on "What was accomplished", Earth Hour is pretty useless. That said, Sydney's Earth Hour shaved almost 30 MW off the load last night. That's not huge, but it is worth recognizing that above a certain "base" load1, the power plants that are "deployed" to meet the increasing load tend to get more expensive (which may or may not mean dirtier). I.e. If the load on the grid is 100 MW and it bumps up to 120 MW, they'll fire up a 30 MW power plant to meet that "peak load" (the plant is called a "peaker"). In california, most of the peakers are Natural gas plants, which are clean2 but expensive (natural gas is expensive) but in other places they'll fire up old coal plants (dirty, and expensive because they're inefficient or falling apart and can't be run 100% of the time).
So, reducing peak loads DOES actually make a difference, but it's pretty obfuscated. *shrug*
HTH.
1 there is always a base load of X MW because the traffic lights and water system pumps are always on, plus whatever incidentals - this is the minimum total load the grid sees and called the "base load".
2 One might ask: why not build more Natural Gas power plants for peak loads for the rest of the country, given that they're clean. This is something that is currently being evaluated by a lot of states, but there are some problems associated with doing this: (a) the natural gas supply curve follows the oil supply curve, meaning, we'll be hitting peak natural gas at some point soon-ish if we're not careful, (b) we're currently importing a lot of natural gas and this would dramatically increase our imports, and (c) many think that the cost of natural gas is going to double in the next year or so from $6-8/MMBtu to ~$16/MMBtu. If this happens, a lot of people are going to find it hard to make ends meet, and, it's going to result in a higher cost of electricity which will effect the economy. Short answer: Natural Gas is not a silver bullet for all of our problems.
jedipussytricks writes:
Subject: I don't get it.
What is Earth Hour supposed to accomplish?
My response:
I believe the main thrust of Earth Hour is:
a) to show how easy it is to just turn off lights you're not using,
b) to show how little actions can make a small difference, and
c) the reduction of carbon emissions (although I think this is a relatively new angle).
One of the first "Earth Hour" type activities was in Thailand where the Prime Minister asked people to turn their lights off - or more specifically, lights that they weren't actually using, like having the light on in the kitchen when you're in the living room - for an hour. He went on TV during this time and showed how much the load on the grid was reduced (i.e. demand) and the cumulative effect was greater than the power produced by one of their large power plants. Huge.
The context for this was that with an improving standard of living in Thailand, and amongst other things, many more air conditioners, the demand had increased to the point where they were looking at building another power plant. This was an attempt at teaching awareness and showing that little actions could make a big difference. I don't have time to do the research now, but I think that's one of the things that spawned the Earth Hour movement.
Something similar happened in California during the energy crisis: people were asked to turn UP their thermostats during the day when they weren't home to reduce the demand on the grid (less aircon), and to turn off their computers and lights and such. The alternative was to face rolling brown-outs. Throughout all of this though, I don't recall a "cause and effect" demonstration that "Look! Everyone turned their lights out during the day, and this meant we didn't have to do a blackout! Thanks guys!" I'm not sure if such an exercise would have proven useful, or if people would have just jumped right back into bad habits once the threat was gone again, but... *shrug*
Anyway, yeah, I think without comprehensive reporting on "What was accomplished", Earth Hour is pretty useless. That said, Sydney's Earth Hour shaved almost 30 MW off the load last night. That's not huge, but it is worth recognizing that above a certain "base" load1, the power plants that are "deployed" to meet the increasing load tend to get more expensive (which may or may not mean dirtier). I.e. If the load on the grid is 100 MW and it bumps up to 120 MW, they'll fire up a 30 MW power plant to meet that "peak load" (the plant is called a "peaker"). In california, most of the peakers are Natural gas plants, which are clean2 but expensive (natural gas is expensive) but in other places they'll fire up old coal plants (dirty, and expensive because they're inefficient or falling apart and can't be run 100% of the time).
So, reducing peak loads DOES actually make a difference, but it's pretty obfuscated. *shrug*
HTH.
1 there is always a base load of X MW because the traffic lights and water system pumps are always on, plus whatever incidentals - this is the minimum total load the grid sees and called the "base load".
2 One might ask: why not build more Natural Gas power plants for peak loads for the rest of the country, given that they're clean. This is something that is currently being evaluated by a lot of states, but there are some problems associated with doing this: (a) the natural gas supply curve follows the oil supply curve, meaning, we'll be hitting peak natural gas at some point soon-ish if we're not careful, (b) we're currently importing a lot of natural gas and this would dramatically increase our imports, and (c) many think that the cost of natural gas is going to double in the next year or so from $6-8/MMBtu to ~$16/MMBtu. If this happens, a lot of people are going to find it hard to make ends meet, and, it's going to result in a higher cost of electricity which will effect the economy. Short answer: Natural Gas is not a silver bullet for all of our problems.