The recent fad (or not so recent, considering it has been going around for some years now, in different forms) of shutting down non-essential lighting and electrical appliances in what is called the Earth Hour, seems a farce to me.
The WWF says that the entire event is merely symbolic and has no real intention of reducing power consumption or helping the environment; it is merely to raise awareness. I doubt how much of that is really happening.
Anyway, my point is, turning off power and reducing demand suddenly for only an hour and then bringing it back up to the original values is not an excellent idea. In fact, the utility companies are going to have a headache. Here’s why:
Power, i.e. electricity, is generated in power plants. Large power plans, the likes of which supply our most contemporary cities are fired by coal. And coal plants (or for that matter most others) cannot be taken offline and brought online in a matter of hours; the process is rather elaborate and sometimes takes a day or two, and is very different from simply flipping a switch.
This means that your reduction of demand is not going to help. In fact, the utility companies will now have to decide what to do with all that surplus electricity. It cannot be effectively stored. And they cannot stop generating it, since soon the world will once again demand it. They will in all likelihood waste it in resistor-banks immersed in huge water tanks in order to smooth the sudden fall in demand.
Think about it. Is your symbolism really helping anybody?
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The above are my first thoughts on this matter. I did some more research, and found out that a Australian power company measured the reduction in demand, and found it to be only 2%. Now this is hardly any reduction at all. All power grids are capable of handling fluctuations of this order, so my original hypothesis stands nullified.
That is to clarify: Earth Hour will reduce demand for power by 2%, which the power plants can successfully follow by reducing the electricity production and there are generally no ill-effects of the same.
However, the true Earth Hour will be when everyone brings in more permanency to the reduction in electricity consumption.
The drop is so low because no one switches off the vital stuff – refrigerators, central air conditioning. But this is a good thing I guess – the more the people know the better. I get irritated at how a lot of people here take electricity for granted; stupidity and carelessness are universal.
Comment by Aditya — 2009, Mar 19 @ 05:04