Earth Hour in California – Success or Bust?
Guest post by Russ Steele, NCWatch
At our house we set the timer to remind us to turn on all the visible out side lights. We have multiple security lights on the garage and the barn that come on when the sun goes down. My friend George Rebane has evidence that he turned on his lights for Earth Hour at Ruminations. I should have done the same, but was working on a sea level issue in R and forgot. I am glad I set the timer to remind me to turn off the outside house lights at 9:30.
The real question is did it Earth Hour make a difference one way or the other?
Roger Sowell had a good idea, he download the the graph below from www.caiso.com, the California Independent System Operator. CAISO is in charge of receiving power from power generating plants, and distributing the power throughout the state grid to the various end users.
Now compare the graph from Saturday 3/28/09 to the one on Sunday 3/29/09 shown below, note the similar slopes during the same time period. Note that annotations were added by Anthony Watts on both graphs.
Roger notes:
There was no apparent decrease in the power load throughout the state, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. No step changes, nothing, nada, zip, zilch.
There you have it, scientific data showing that the Earth Hour was a total bust in California. If you look close, you can see a little bump up above the forecast demand, which tracked very closely with actual power consumed prior to the witching hour 8:30 to 9:30. But, it is clear that power consumption did not drop, it stayed up. Maybe all those protesters forgot to turn off the lights.
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@Jason A
I think you are the one missing the point. Having access to abundant electricty
means that hospitals and care institutions can run 24/7 and thus prolong lives.
Not much evidence of that in a darkend Africa, don’t you think?
BTW, this adult is telling you to pull your head in.
Jeez.
Here in NC we went to the movie theater at that time. I can assure you that the theater house lights were out during earth Hour…
🙂
Why are you wasting your time on this?
I lived in southern Nevada (Las Vegas area) for a few years and nobody needed to ban black or other dark car paints there. Most people had enough sense on their own to buy a light-colored vehicle. The locals call them ‘desert friendly.’
The only controversy was how dark should the window tints be? Too dark actually makes the car interior hotter.
For some reason the same logic didn’t apply to home roofs. Many still used darker colors.
What people should have done was just flip the main breakers and live without electricity for a few days. Get used to what it will be like if we don’t build enough new power plants to provide a reliable supply in the future.
Jason A. (00:07:42) :
“Richard Heg: so what, are you trying to say that leaving the lights on at night makes you live longer? ”
No – the point is that HAVING lights to turn on means one is living in a developed society. Which, in turn, leads to longer life. Life in “undeveloped” areas is still, as always, short, nasty and brutal.
It’s “your” conclusion that’s silly.
Wow Jason I have no trouble seeing Richards point. Good post Richard. Lige expectancy correlates very closely with the availability of energy. Both per capita use and availability of energy correlate very strongly with life expectancy.
As for Earth hour it was once again a triumph of symbolism over substance and self righteous sloganeering over rational thought.
Who are the grown ups?
Richard Heg
So-a definite link then between darkness and fertility. Surprising, I thought, when the great Northeast Power Outage of 2003 occured that there was a spike in births 9 months later. Must be a cultural thing then.
In Ontario (the Canadian Province, not the California county!) the local Power Authority trumpeted a drop of 6% in demand. Yet I checked their web site and this was not the case – it actually went up slightly.
http://www.geocities.com/mcmgk/Earth_Hour_Ontario_Power.html
But as we all know, when it comes to global warming the actual truth doesn’t matter to far too many people!
Jason A.: “It was an educational/attention-getting exercise, and ‘8,000 articles’ seems to indicate success.”
No, it was an exercise in ecopropaganda. From the Earth Hour website:
“This year, Earth Hour has been transformed into the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming.
For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming.”
http://www.earthhour.org/about/
As I showed in the post above, it was a total fizzle at least in our neck of the woods!
Late Sydney Earth Hour(s):
Monday, 30 March 2009 11:13 – Sydney power blackout causes chaos
I think you need more info. to claim no effect.
Looking at the graphs the 28Mar09 pre Earth hour consumption is flatlining at approx 24000MW then it picks up from about 18:30hrs on to peak at 26500MW before dropping to average approx. 26000MW during EH.
29Mar09 shows approx flatlining at 23500MW before picking up at approx 17:00 to peak at 27300MW before dropping to an approx average of 27000MW for the EH equivalent period. So 1000MW difference = 1GW = approx one power station.
On these figures I’d say that is about a 4% reduction in consumption – significant in terms of some of the consumption reduction targets talked about. But these figures aren’t enough – one needs to see ambient temps., sunset times, details of loads on the transmission network etc etc.
Take an average UK suburban home with 10 60W lights on dropping to one – that is a 540W saving. Half a kW is significant and simply requires switching off. Ok so Al Gore’s personal consumption makes him look a fool but I think you are kidding yourselves if you think reducing personal consumption is irrelevant. The power stations aren’t putting the juice into some secret bank of fixed resistors…. are they? 🙂
slowtofollow: “I think you need more info. to claim no effect.”
From CAISO archive – Total power demand for Saturday, March 21 at 9:00 PM- 25.5 GW
From CAISO archive – Total power demand for Saturday, March 28 at 9:00 PM- 25.4 GW
Looks like simply a humungous impact to me!
This was due to all the people sitting in the dark with nothing better to do than log onto the internet to argue about Earth Hour.
slowtofollow: “Half a kW is significant and simply requires switching off. Ok so Al Gore’s personal consumption makes him look a fool but I think you are kidding yourselves if you think reducing personal consumption is irrelevant. The power stations aren’t putting the juice into some secret bank of fixed resistors…. are they? :)”
Ah, you forgot about those of us celebrating Human Achievement Hour at the same time! The savings from turning off 10 16 watt CFLs are dwarfed by activating the self cleaning oven, lowering the fridge freezer temperature, turning on the clothes and dish washers, the clothes dryer, electric space heaters and a swarth of incandescent light bulbs all at 8:30! I figure a climate realist can outpower a climate sheep at a ratio of at least 40:1! Not fair really is it?
Just like good little AGW followers, they make claims that are not supported by the real numbers.
Here in BC, less people than last year turned off their lights… “but it was a success” according to them.
There referendum is a flop. The majority don’t want our politiciens to deal with this non-problem.
Lubos Motl (23:00:45) :
“It’s kind of amazing. Google News gives…”
Don´t forget Al Gore is a member of their board of directors.
Jason A. (00:07:42) :
Richard Heg: so what, are you trying to say that leaving the lights on at night makes you live longer? That’s a pretty silly conclusion to draw, but I can’t think of any other point you could be trying to make, other than just linking to random graphs.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation, Jason. But then, this is the same mistake you AGWers always make. The lighting is simply a proxie. It is evidence of economic development, and of higher living standards, which lead to a longer life-expectancy.
It was an educational/attention-getting exercise, and ‘8,000 articles’ seems to indicate success.
Amazing, isn’t it, that after all these years, and with a continual barrage of hype and propaganda via the MSM, schools, and even a Nobel-prize winning “movie”, that they still need to peddle the product of manmade global warming/climate change alarmism? You think the 8,000 articles hyping this “event” whose sole purpose was to promote “awareness” of a pseudoscientific ideology which has been trumpeted worldwide on a non-stop basis for years is evidence of “success”? Talk about cognitive dissonance!
In regards to Richard Heg’s post:
Note that the ultimate goal, assuming you believe the AGW hypotheiss, is to cut back world production of CO2 producing energy by 80%. Find Haiti and
Somalia on the world map. They’re the two countries already below that 80% worldwide average figure.
What baseline are they using to calculate a percentage reduction in consumption? They shouldn’t use the hour before. Shouldn’t they use the consumption figures from 24 hours before “earth hour”? Or perhaps an average of the prior 7 to 10 days at that hour? I don’t know. I can see plenty of room for fun with figures here to make earth hour look like a major triumph.
Earth Hour is rich in irony considering that well meaning eco folks are hell bent on bringing civilization headlong into another Dark Age. Although the scary part is that there are plenty of other groups out there also seeking the same result.
Along a similar thread, there was an interesting NY Times report on CFLs not performing as intended. I would like to warn that I had one of these wonderful earth saving lights catch on fire recently. The base overheated, like fluorescent ballasts tend to do and the next thing I knew there was a whooshing sound, darkness, flickering and smoke pouring out from the large base of the bulb. The only thing that saved my fixture was that I quickly shut off the switch to the light. It took hours of open windows on a freezing cold day to remove the stench from my home. We were fortunate that I happened to be nearby when this occurred.
I’m wondering how many homes and lives will be lost to fire due to these defective CFL bulbs.
Nuclear fusion is coming sooner than most people realize.
The Z-machine effort at Sandia has nearly all the requisite technologies in place to successfully develop an inertial confinement fusion system based on z-pinch methods. The plasma temperatures are high enough for clean (non-neutronic) He3 fusion and beyond.
In thirty years we could be in a whole new game. If we had to we could use fusion-based power to suck CO2 out of the air, to crack CO2 & make new hydrocarbons (FT synthesis). This is what we need to be researching & planning for, not expensive wind farms.
Unfortunately z-pinch tech also represents a new hazard in terms of nuclear proliferation.
Ahhh, civilization. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
Mark above – yeah, that 40:1 is a killer!
Re: personal impact- I wonder if a better way to make the point about the impact of personal behaviour would be for the Earth Hour to become the big switch on?
If we all ramped up the pointless devices we had on for an hour I think the effect could be a bit easier to spot? 🙂 You could look at each one as a little way to celebrate human achievement and intellect? Just make sure you check the total breaker capacity before you chuck all the switches – it’d be a real shame to miss human achievement hour trying to change a fat fuse in the dark! ;0
Interesting stat from the CAISO archive – any idea why it is so far off the actual demand line on the graph in the post? Looks closer to the forecast figure to me?
Another take might be that the number of AGW proponents that went dark was offset by the number of disgusted skeptics that went full power.
You can’t turn your lights off.
It takes too long to warm up those darn new expensive energy saving bulbs. It is easier to just leave all the lights on because you never know what room you are going to walk into when you need something.
Cause and effect, where there is an action there is a reaction.
Serenity now !!!!!!!!!!