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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Richard Heg (22:42:57) :
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/03/california-to-ban-sale-of-blac.html
Someone needs to tell them that when a black thing reflects all the incoming light it’s called a white thing…
OK, what is it going to take to get people educated enough to understand that WE (i.e. people) can NOT legislate physics?
“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. ”
Um, I think that was people like me who turned on all our stuff at about 8 rather than 8:30 … didn’t want to “miss” the actual start time 😎
BTW, a walkabout of the neighborhood before and after showed no net change. For each house that went dark (2 of them?) there were a couple that lit up (and then some, like my Christmas Lights 😎 but the vast majority just didn’t do a darned thing. Life goes on…
Wondering Aloud,
I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. Nuclear is the cheapest, cleanest, safest. Combine with electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles and mainstream energy-based pollution would be gone.
The “Green” agenda is “unthinking ideology”, not a product of rational thought. Consequently, as you suggest, Green solutions are rarely sound — either scientifically, practically, or with regard to the actual outcome.
All this from someone who fervently wants a greener society. Thing is, as an Engineering Scientist, I want it done “right”.
Mark (08:15:49) “If the figures are updated to fine tune the result over time then that might explain it.” …. I’m sure I’ve heard that in another context?….
Agree re: eyeball values – I risked turning the brightness up for a mo. and all became clear! Looks like were at a bit less than a power station worth now. Maybe by the end of the week the figures will have crept up/down a bit more!? 🙂 There is a comment somewhere above about one of the utilities claiming a 6% demand drop – anybody work in the industry who can give us a bit of real info?
Also I wonder what happened at 10:50am on the 28th?
Yup, in spite of esurance’s non-stop green-agenda driven ads for this nonsensical hour, I and everyone I know chose to simply go about business as usual. For the record, there are no CFLs in my house, either. I’ll pay for higher quality lighting, thank you (fluorescent lights give me a headache to boot). I wish I could say I was baking 10 cakes or something at that time, while microwaving a cat and leaving the fridge door open, but alas, I was simply watching my big-screen TV with most of the lights in the house left on. I think our halogen floor lamp was turned on, however. Too bad I can’t buy those anymore.
Mark
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.
Um, actually it’s a very intelligent point to make. Exterior lighting correlates quite strongly with reduced crime of all sorts including violent life threatening crime. The is exactly why we have street lights. It’s not so you car doesn’t need headlights or so old aunt Sadie can leave the flashlight at home… There is some effect on auto / pedestrian accidents and auto / auto accidents too, but that’s smaller.
The secondary correlation, though, is that once a society has enough power that they can afford to light the large open street area, they certainly have enough to do the essentials like refrigerate food and medicine and run telephones to the ambulance service.
Like it or not, exterior lighting is a great indicator of affluence, and affluent societies are vastly safer and healthier than poor ones. The best thing you can do for humanity (and for the planet) is to get everyone on it to an advanced, western, affluent lifestyle as rapidly as possible.
A rich society sets aside giant nature preserves. A poor one cuts them down for food and fuel… and kills each other fighting over the last scraps.
Our city achieved a reduction of 0.3% over Earth Day, and an overall province wide reduction of 1.1%. This compares to a province wide reduction of 2% last year. The hydro company blamed the poor showing on “cooler weather than last year”.
Must be the global warming inversion we’re having….
I published a similar story earlier on American Thinker and found that New York also did not have any drop in electric usage. I could not find a graph for New York so I had to plot the data from their ISO.
The biggest conflict of interest: Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–the rest of the story – from the Canada Free Press:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9629
Richard Heg (01:16:51) : For me the image of a dark Africa makes me think of how hard it is for children to get an education when they have to work during the day and have no light to read by night.
This is exactly correct.
One of the big success stories of poverty eradication is in rural India. The model is to set up a micro power station (some are solar PV, some are Lister type Diesels running on plant oils – that also runs the seed crusher to get the plant oils…). This provide just enough electricity to run a couple of light bulbs and a satellite TV system. The village WAS tied to the sun cycle. Sundown, end of farm day, sleep. No time to learn or improve. Next day, up, plough, plant, harvest, cook, sleep. Repeat.
With the couple of light bulbs, the women indulge in craft work for making money (starting a virtuous circle of minor profit, micro lending, improved health, more capital stock – think rocket stove…) while the men get to see the ‘how to grow more crops with less work’ ag show on the TV and the kids get an education via the ‘school show’ on the TV. The intellectual capital of the village starts to rise exponentially.
The results are often spectacular.
There is an absolute and undeniable cause and effect between the arrival of even trivial amounts of electric power and the rise from grinding poverty toward modernity and prosperity.
Sidebar on plant oil Diesels: Before folks lament the feeding of food to engines, realize that the advantages outweigh the fuel consumed. The farmers get more total yield due to what they learn. They even, thanks to the Diesel powering a seed crusher, have excess oil left over.
Where before their human capital was spent grinding seeds by hand, they now have time and because the machinery is more efficient than hand grinding, they have excess oil not a shortage. The women often turn this oil into soap and start selling it; getting money they never had before. (And everyone gets cleaner and healthier) Some women use the (now readily available) soap to start a laundry business. That money lets them buy more tools and more advancement. Soon follows a sewing machine and a micro-scale clothing business. Rocket stoves cut the need for cooking wood / fuel. The pressed seed cake is used for fertilizer directly or fed to goats and the goat poo used for fertilizer improving the soil. (Eventually they learn to make ‘gobar gas’ fermenters and goat poo gas replaces wood at the cooking fuel of choice…). The preferred oil seeds come from legume trees that add nitrogen to the soil, improving it over time.
At the end of the day, less land is needed, more food is grown, everyone is happier, healthier, more educated, and more prosperous. Food shortages are eliminated (due to more goat meat, more cheese, more cooking oils, less soil degradation, better technique, etc.) Oh, and it’s “carbon neutral” 😎
This is a microcosm of the entire world. We need more technology and electricity, not less. To do otherwise is to begin a spiral decent into hell rather than the virtuous circle into modernity and prosperity.
This is not speculation, it is an existence proof.
O/T but recognizes UHI as an exploitable resource. hmmmmm
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/42160/title/Urban_Heat_Recycling_waste_heat
Can we see a graph of crime during earth hour? With all the lights out the boogies had a field day breaking into homes.
Dan Lee (03:20:28) : I think I dumped more carbon into the atmosphere in that one hour than I typically do in a whole week. I’ll have to do this more often
Oh gosh! I hadn’t even thought of that! I wonder how many “save the Earthers” were sitting in candle light dumping out 100 times the “pollution” as a compact fluorescent would make and being self congratulatory about it?!
I know that at least one of the “darker homes” on my walkabout looked like it had candle flickers from inside… I wonder, too, how many of them realize that modern candles are almost totally made from petroleum wax? (You can get a very nice stearic acid candle from Ikea that smells a bit like crayons and doesn’t smoke as much when you put it out. My preferred candles since they store better – don’t melt as easy; and burn more cleanly IMHO.)
In BC we had a dip of 1.1% during the Earth Hour… BUT IT WAS A HUGE SUCCESS!!!
You can have a car in any color you want, as long as that color is white.
> Ghost of Henry Ford.
Earth Hour was a resounding success — only in the minds of AGW True Believers and Mainstream Media. These clowns are so wrapped up in their fantasy delusion of righteous adulthood that they just can’t see the drool and spittle on their bibs as they adoringly feed each other strained peas.
I watched the News at 11! As the talking head solemnly pronounced the success of Earth Hour, a clip played showing the lights that were turned out; what I saw was a panoramic view of a fully illuminated city skyline.
A concrete example of cognitive dissonance on display for all to see.
Up here in the Great White North I observed that the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) was reporting live on the Earth Hour and even the Weather Channel had some poor soul outside reporting on the level of lighting or some such thing. I suppose the folks that produced these programs thought that our televisions would be the last things we would switch off in support of Earth Hour. I believe that all this just contributes to the evidence that, as a species, we are a faulty design with defects that lend themselves to self extermination.
Mark (06:20:41) : Ah, you forgot about those of us celebrating Human Achievement Hour at the same time! […] I figure a climate realist can outpower a climate sheep at a ratio of at least 40:1! Not fair really is it?
You know, you’ve given me an idea… For next “achievement hour” I’m going to fire up the arc welder and fabricate a new BBQ.
There’s nothing like a 250 AMP arc make you feel like you are achieving!
(Though I may need to check the mains breaker size… don’t know if I have enough 240V capacity to run a welder and the stove and the oven and the cloths drier and… at the same time…)
Anthony, and Russ Steele, all I can say is “wow.” And thank you!
A question I have is about the sudden dip and bounce back shown on the March 28 graph, at around 10:45 a.m. That is similar to what I was expecting to see at 8:30 p.m., if the Earth Hour had an effect.
Does anyone have an idea what caused the dip? Maybe Californians cannot tell time, and got the Earth Hour thing off by about 10 hours? It wouldn’t be turning off the lights, not at that time of day. Did the women all stop blowdrying their hair right about that time?
A couple of thoughts based on earlier comments, the first regarding turning off lights at night. Many lights will not be turned off due to security concerns, and liability concerns. For example, if a person were assaulted in a darkened parking structure because the landlord turned off the lights to celebrate Earth Hour, the landlord would be in great difficulty in defending a negligence or personal injury lawsuit.
Second, California just passed a new regulation aimed at inflating vehicle tires, as part of the AB 32 Global Warming Solutions Act. In this one, the service provider (oil changers, mechanics, smog testers) must measure tire pressure and adjust them. One can only hope that the testers do not let the air out of a hot tire, so it meets the pressure stated on the sidewall. When the tire cools down, the tire will then be under-inflated and therefore unsafe.
California is going to injure us all with these regulations (or worse)!
The recent ‘Earth Hour’ stunt was a propaganda victory. The hype was covered by all the major media in this country.
The fact that the overwhelming majority of people didn’t care and either ignored ‘Earth Hour’s or decided to celebrate ‘Human Achievement Day’ was also uniformly not reported by the same media.
Outside of the fleeting propaganda achieved, ‘Earth Hour’ was a complete failure.
Tom in South Jersey (06:47:44) : Along a similar thread, there was an interesting NY Times report on CFLs not performing as intended.
One of the problems is that you get about 10,000 on / off cycles if you are lucky then the ‘starter’ burns out. At 10 / day that’s 1000 days or less than 3 years and your savings go POOF! Those pretty charts with 10 year amortization only work if you cycle the bulb 2 or 3 times a day MAX. (And that’s part of why commercial buildings leave the lights on so much. The labor cost to replace the bulbs or pay for electricity make it far more economical to leave them on and get a long life out of them). Save the planet from mercury pollution and wasted CFBs: Leave them on all the time!
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
This is the usual failure mode for fluorescent bulbs. The starter can’t get the bulb to start anymore so it stays “locked up” with the heater current running the bulb heater full tilt (ends glowing dull red) until something overheats and goes FUNT!
I have a PL-13 in my porch light and about every 5 years it does this. The base of the PL-13 lamp is burn your skin hot to touch, but the fixture seems to survive ( if a bit scorched…) Makes a loud buzzing when it’s doing it too (so I’m not so worried… I can hear when it’s doing this…)
It took hours of open windows on a freezing cold day to remove the stench from my home.
My formula for removing stench (tobacco or burned electronics or even that bright idea for a broiled meatloaf 😎 is simple: Alternate a mist of ammonia vapor with a mist of vinegar vapor at 20 minute intervals.
You can start and end with either one. I like to finish with ammonia since it dissipates well, some folks like vinegar since it smells like a Caesar salad 😉
Fine mist in the air. Wait 20 minutes. Air out if desired. Fine mist of other stuff. Wait 20 minutes. Repeat if needed.
Pretty much anything with a smell will react with either an acid or a base. The vapors will penetrate most fabrics and neutralize smells there too. Most finishes are fine with these common cleaners. All traces eventually evaporate (no solids left). In a pinch, you can to a tiny “neutralize” spray to get to zero odor a bit faster, though it’s tricky to get just enough ammonia to neutralize the vinegar in the air… or verse vicea
For burn smells I usually start with ammonia since most burn products are dry acids.
First developed out of desperation when stuck with a hotel room in DC with overstuffed furniture reeking of 40 years of accumulated back room deal cigar smoke et. al. Took 3 cycles, one with the door closed for an hour of each vapor, and direct dampening of the horsehair oversized chair, but the room became very livable as opposed to gagging.
(Based loosely on the military chemical warfare decontamination procedure but using vapors instead of liquid wash and using much more mild acid / base pair…)
I’m wondering how many homes and lives will be lost to fire due to these defective CFL bulbs.
And how much heath damage from the mercury.
I’m an early adopter of CFL bulbs (CFBs). My home is 90%+ CFLs. I’ve also (over 10 – 15 years now) had roughly 4 of them break the glass one way or another. I have no idea how much mercury this has added to my home, but the mercury vapor does not stay in the bulb when broken… I’m not paranoid about it (maybe I should be…) having grown up with amalgam fillings and mercury switches; but they are NOT the enviro-friendly thing folks think they are and there are places they MUST NOT be used (fridge, oven, photographic darkroom, automotive work light (rough handing lights), etc.) due to contamination or breakage issues.
I’m even not so comfortable using them in the kitchen overhead (and would never put one in the fume hood over the stove) but do so because I have a complete glass bowl surround of the light fixture. You do not want mercury in your food preparation area…
Also, FWIW, the recent crop of $1 and less CFBs from China have had a horrific failure rate. Often I’ve gotten just a month or two from them (and I’ve had several DOI or at first light FUNT.) I’ve temporarily started running off my stock of older CFLs and bought an inventory of Incandescent bulbs ‘just in case’ while I sort out who is still a reliable source for new bulbs. FWIW, I still have one very old GE circle light from about 15 years ago over the back patio. It was lit up for “achievement hour”. Built well, to say the least…
I have no need nor desire to send my money to China so they can send mercury bombs to me… (even though the glass didn’t break, the mercury is now a disposal issue.)
Earth Hour was a a publicity gimmick to do only ONE THING.
Allow the cynical gangsters. who pushed out the original concerned citizens, who now rule the environmental organizations, to establish yet another reason for more “fund-raising”.
The increased contributions, by individual foolish eco-loons, and moneys from heretofore charitable Foundations, will let them pay themselves even more money. It will protect their environmental organization-provided private jets and chauferred limousines of their every need.
They need those to travel to Bali or Rio or the Riviera, or some other place to meet with people from across the street and down the hall, to waste time attending some other environmental conference or other. Of course, they will fit in a little shopping and vacationing too.
[please tone down the language – “factual disagreement” is better choice – Anthony]
And it has massive funding from those in power.
It is just another tactic used against the non thinking, gut reaction members of the world to ‘justify’ the current grab for absolute power over us all.
Now, I am all for conserving, and I hate wasting anything.
Food, electricity, fuel, resources.
BRAIN CELLS . . .
But I am also against governments OUT OF CONTROL.
THAT is the real issue here.
REAL science shows we are actually in a cooling phase.
The planet isn’t static, it is always in a state of change.
Or, didn’t you notice the glaciers left us a few thousand years ago.
AGAIN . . .
Seems the planet has gone through HUNDREDS of hot/cold phases.
I expect it will continue to do so, all green intentions aside.
So, evidence shows that earth hour was a total bust, yet we hear from a great many it was a HUGE success.
I myself can only vouch for Lafayette, Indiana, but there was nothing here to indicate any real participation at all.
I personally know of no one who bought into this bs.
But think whatever makes you feel warm & fuzzy inside.
If you have already convinced yourself global warming is true and our leaders are trying to stop it, you are way past the point of being able to learn anyway.
Facts simply mean nothing in regards to how you wish to look upon the world.
John Galt . . .
from TOL?
JohnSmiles here