March 26, 2010
Turn Off the Lights!
A composite image of the Earth at night (credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Scientific Visualization Studio)
One of the most wonderful memories I have from a sailing trip is being miles and miles from shore on a moonless night and seeing the thousands of stars twinkling in the sky. It’s something that most people in the developed world never see; most of the stars are drowned out by light pollution. As you can see in the image above, even at night it’s pretty bright in the parts of the world where most of the people live.
A lot of that light is wasted energy, which equals unnecessary carbon emissions. But what if we turned out the lights, just for an hour? That’s what the World Wildlife Fund is challenging all of us to do Saturday night at 8:30 p.m. local time. They call it Earth Hour. Millions of people, hundreds of cities and a host of organizations—including my very own Smithsonian Institution—will be turning out the lights tomorrow night to say that something needs to be done about climate change. I will, too. Will you?
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No. I’m going to celebrate Human Achievement Hour by turning on every light in my house. It’s a way to mark the greatness of human ingenuity, which brought light into the darkness of the world.
[...] The hour “symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight,” the fund says. Most times, even at night, the world’s most populous areas are still bright with light, but most of it is just wasted energy. [...]
As an awareness tool and marketing gimmick, Earth Hour is a great idea. In reality, it dosen’t really save too much power. Coal-fired generators take days to heat up and cool down, so for an hour demand dip, they just earth the oversupply. Same with most mid-range plants, they tend to take a couple hours to spin up. Hydro is almost instant, but that’s about it.
If you want to make a real impact, try to run your appliances (dishwasher, electric clothes dryer,etc) after midnight, when demand is down. A lot of power is generated and wasted during that time. Hopefully the new smart metering technology will provide some economic incentive to better utilise our existing power supply without having to radically change our lifestyles.