Why "Earth Hour" is a terrible idea

[Tessian]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090330/wl_ ... alia_power

The city of Sydney apparently shut off their power for earth hour 2 days ago and now they have a massive blackout due to equipment failure... obviously the two have nothing in common. This is what happens when activists don't bother to learn shit about their own cause. Not only does this NOT help curb pollution, but it puts a horrible strain on the electric grid as seen here.

Is this why I haven't seen 50 tweets from Andrew today?

[Eric]

It...puts a strain on it by turning the lights out? *Scratches head* I don't actually see the relation, and the article you linked to doesn't seem to blame Earth Hour either. This is your personal opinion I take it?

[Tessian]

It...puts a strain on it by turning the lights out? *Scratches head* I don't actually see the relation, and the article you linked to doesn't seem to blame Earth Hour either. This is your personal opinion I take it?

Actually yes, but moreso by all the power coming back on at once. The article does mention Earth Hour, but obviously it's too soon for them to just outright call it the reason for this.

Electrical power grids are not designed for large spikes and drops in demand, and most power plants provide a steady supply of power regardless. So the supply is still there but the demand drops sharply and all that power has to go somewhere, right? All that demand coming back at once would be what would cause a worse strain on the grid, though. Because most people don't bother with this "holiday" it doesn't do much in most places, but since Sydney was a city that decided to make it mandatory obviously it had a much greater impact on the equipment.

Simply put: power grids are not designed to be messed around with by a bunch of well meaning idiots who don't even realize doing this barely even does what they wanted it to do-- curb pollution, if for that short hour. You want to reduce pollution why don't you try using less energy EVERY DAY, not just turning off the lights for one hour. It's as stupid as those people last summer who wanted to boycott gas for a day.

[Zeus]

So the entire town of Sydney decided to turn on their lights all at the same time? Fucking impressive timing

But you gotta give the people who designed the system credit. It held on for two whole days after this obvious DoS attack by the city's residents before it finally succumbed to the pressure.

Just in case you somehow missed it....SARCASM ALERT!!!

[Tessian]

So the entire town of Sydney decided to turn on their lights all at the same time? Fucking impressive timing

But you gotta give the people who designed the system credit. It held on for two whole days after this obvious DoS attack by the city's residents before it finally succumbed to the pressure.

Just in case you somehow missed it....SARCASM ALERT!!!

From what they said the city itself shut the power, they didn't just ask everyone to do it at the same time. Also I'm sure the infrastructure was 100% for the 2 days inbetween... no way during that time there was continued system degradation and hardware failing over to backups that couldn't handle the load for long term, right?

[bovine]

Is this why I haven't seen 50 tweets from Andrew today?

Yeah! I haven't seen that guy in the twittersphere for a while now.

[SineSwiper]

Earth Hour is about as dumb as Gas Outs. It solves nothing.

[Mental]

I don't think it's a horrible idea, but as the story proves, our collective power grids are not really set up to handle sudden fluctuations and drops like this.

I personally think the better solution is to start fixing the equipment, but you do have to be aware of this stuff in planning these things, and some environmentalists aren't.

I tried to do Green Hour, but fell asleep with my computer and fan running instead. Environmentalism fail.

[Mental]

I have been trying to be good generally, though - buying a water filter instead of bottled water, turning off electricity I'm not using, even trying to set up a system where I can use a switcher to make sure adapters that aren't plugged into their various devices aren't wasting juice. Our devices are WAY lossy like that.

I mean, shit, part of the huge problem is that most power grids still lose something like EIGHTY PERCENT of their energy to transmission noise and dissipation. That really seems like we could have been doing better than that by now.

[Tessian]

In the past 6 months I've become much more aware of what power I use.. probably because now I'm the only one paying for it. I started turning my DVR / HTPC off at night (also bought a more energy efficient PSU for it) and putting my desktop to sleep during work and I definitely noticed it in my electric bill.

You'd have so much more success in showing people how being energy efficient saves them MONEY, and not just cause it's good for the environment.

[Shrinweck]

You'd have so much more success in showing people how being energy efficient saves them MONEY, and not just cause it's good for the environment.

This. A good example is my family buying a newer, more energy efficient, refrigerator which saved us so much money per month in electricity that it ended up paying for itself... I'm not sure how long it took but it wasn't too long. Also our old fridge was like 10+ years old, so just the very act of modernizing equipment is worthwhile.

A switch to florescent is a good example of this, too. Honestly, I mostly just buy florescent because they last so damn long heh. White light does kind of suck, yes, but hey that's what lamp shades and shit like that are for. And there's something just plain cool about lights that flicker on, in my opinion.

[Flip]

You'd have so much more success in showing people how being energy efficient saves them MONEY, and not just cause it's good for the environment.

This. A good example is my family buying a newer, more energy efficient, refrigerator which saved us so much money per month in electricity that it ended up paying for itself... I'm not sure how long it took but it wasn't too long. Also our old fridge was like 10+ years old, so just the very act of modernizing equipment is worthwhile.

A switch to florescent is a good example of this, too. Honestly, I mostly just buy florescent because they last so damn long heh. White light does kind of suck, yes, but hey that's what lamp shades and shit like that are for. And there's something just plain cool about lights that flicker on, in my opinion.

I pony up for those CFL sprially bulbs. Talk about lasting forever.

[Zeus]

You'd have so much more success in showing people how being energy efficient saves them MONEY, and not just cause it's good for the environment.

Very true. I put energy-efficient bulbs everywhere and turned down my air-conditioning / heat a few degrees so they weren't ALWAYS on (until the kids came along). We installed efficient toilets and turned lights off all the time. You see the money savings.

In Ontario, we actually had a program where they gave you extra rebates or something for dropping your usage by 10% a couple of years ago. Of course this came a couple of years after I moved into my house and had already made all these changes. Essentially, I was punished for being proactive and not requiring monetary rewards to cut my usage....bastards :-)

[RentCavalier]

See, its funny, I never bothered with participating in Earth Hour 'cause I'd always forget/get lazy/wanna play video games.

So, it's actually a bad thing? Sweet. My laziness is JUSTIFIED.

[Mental]

See, its funny, I never bothered with participating in Earth Hour 'cause I'd always forget/get lazy/wanna play video games.

So, it's actually a bad thing? Sweet. My laziness is JUSTIFIED.

It's not a bad thing - just, like a lot of the more publicity-oriented environmental projects, it doesn't always take into account that the rest of the world is not set up or prepared to be environmentally conscious yet.