Earth Hour of Power !!!!!

**VladTepes** · 22nd March 2013, 10:59 PM

Celebrate Human Achievement this Saturday... 8:30 to 9:30 pm

The Glory! We are the lucky generation with light at the flick of a switch

In the hundred thousand years since homo sapiens came to be, people have fled bondage, wars, small-pox, dysentery, died from minor scratches, starved to death, been ravaged by lions, stricken by cholera, and survived the odd ninety thousand year stretches of hypothermic, abysmal ice age. We lived in the darkness for 99,900 years, cowering in corners, listening to drips, waiting for the sun.

This is your chance to show your commitment to fighting the forces of darkness. Be brave, stand up to the people who want to tell you what kind of light bulb you are allowed to buy. Feed the world by helping to boost global CO2 to lift crop yields and fertilize farms all over the planet. Children are hungry in Haiti and, since CO2 is a well mixed gas, sooner or later, you will be helping them.

Things you can do at 8.30 on Saturday:
1. Write down the tally on the electricity meter.
2. Turn on all the lights you can find (bonus points for incandescents from the stash.)
3. Put on the party lights, the patio light, the pool light, the mozzie zappers, unpack those Christmas decorations. Get out your torches. Switch the movement detector spotlights to continuous operation. (Involve the kids — they love to help).
4. Light your backyard with the car headlights! Bonus points if it’s a V8. (Don’t flatten the battery, make sure you keep that engine running.)
5. Don’t forget those bar radiators — revel in that infra red! (Light the kitchen with the ones in the oven and grill.)
6. Drink toasts to coal miners, oil rig workers, and power station staff.
7. At 9.30pm read that meter and work out how many KWhr you’ve liberated.

Who will win The Hour of Power?

Some of those fossil fuels have been waiting for 100 million years to return to the sky. The cheapest most cost-effective way to liberate those fuels is to buy Hard Coking Coal which is as cheap as $1/ton on Alibaba.com (enough for every power hour for the rest of your life, and there’ll be some left for the kids too: the minimum order is 30,000 t. Send your bulk carrier.) Failing that, just fill up a jerry can.

You CAN make a difference !!!!

**Hoges** · 22nd March 2013, 11:48 PM

The lights went out in Canberra yesterday...does that count?

**Reads90** · 23rd March 2013, 06:29 AM

Personally ,Never really seen the point of this as the power companies still have to produce the same amount of power and as you can't store it. It is just wasted and causes the same amount of green issues as any normal night.
They can't turn off the power stations for an hour and can never judge how many people are going to take part so can't even guess what to shut down.

**bee utey** · 23rd March 2013, 08:19 AM

Originally Posted by Reads90

Personally ,Never really seen the point of this as the power companies still have to produce the same amount of power and as you can't store it. It is just wasted and causes the same amount of green issues as any normal night.
They can't turn off the power stations for an hour and can never judge how many people are going to take part so can't even guess what to shut down.

?????

Your hypothetical power station would be like designing a car with a fully open throttle and only being able to control speed by the amount of pressure you apply to the brakes!!!! A substantial part of electricity production in Australia is by gas fired power plants and they can react as quickly as they need to. How do you think electricity grids cope during area wide blackouts???? I don't hear the sound of of power stations screaming out of control.

Anyway, Earth Hour is a greenwash piece of bull**** and I don't imagine any amount of switch flicking will affect the world's greenhouse emissions in any measureable way.

**Reads90** · 23rd March 2013, 08:53 AM

Originally Posted by bee utey

?????

Anyway, Earth Hour is a greenwash piece of bull**** and I don't imagine any amount of switch flicking will affect the world's greenhouse emissions in any measureable way.

That is pretty much what I was getting at and the fact that a power station is not as quick as a car to respond to change in conditions.

**rovercare** · 23rd March 2013, 09:32 AM

Originally Posted by Reads90

That is pretty much what I was getting at and the fact that a power station is not as quick as a car to respond to change in conditions.

Bee utey just corrected you, yet you turn it into that's what you meant?

**bee utey** · 23rd March 2013, 10:35 AM

Originally Posted by Reads90

That is pretty much what I was getting at and the fact that a power station is not as quick as a car to respond to change in conditions.

Actually power stations micromanage loads all the time. They have to. Coal fired plants are indeed slow but at 8.30pm they are already wound down and the gas generators balance the load nicely. It's quite irrelevant to the bit about Earth Hour. And of course plant operators have the news/weather forecasts/previous event profiles on screen all the time, ready to react.

The reason that Earth Hour is a waste of time is that a thousand people switching off their energy efficient lightbulbs will be offset by a small number of people as parodied by Vlad Tepes who switch on all their fan heaters. It's human nature that's faulty, not the science.

BTW I have downlights in my house which had 60W bulbs originally. They were replaced with 20W compact fluorescents. Now I am replacing them with 7W LED globes. Each step has seen an increase in light output. Yet my biggest reduction in daily power usage will be from finally mounting hot water panels on a frame facing north west with a solar powered circulating pump and a ground level storage tank. I can't do a regular roof mounted system due to the house's alignment so it took a while to set this up properly. Recent sunny days have saved 5kWh every day which the power companies have to adjust for, eeek.

Earth Hour, doing a little and claiming a lot.

**ugu80** · 23rd March 2013, 10:35 AM

www.tomwaterhouse.com for the best odds on how many households turn off their lights.

Proudly brought to you by bob10

**Hoges** · 23rd March 2013, 11:03 AM

Originally Posted by Reads90

Personally ,Never really seen the point of this as the power companies still have to produce the same amount of power and as you can't store it. It is just wasted and causes the same amount of green issues as any normal night.
They can't turn off the power stations for an hour and can never judge how many people are going to take part so can't even guess what to shut down.

yep, generators powered by midnight oil

but it's OK ...all the incandescent globes are/have been replaced by high tech doobies which cost 20 times the price and whose manufacture releases far more green house gas than they'll ever save!

**Lotz-A-Landies** · 23rd March 2013, 11:22 AM

With all the spare power in the grid, the hydro stations like Tallowa and Bendeela will be able to pump up more water to make more electricity tomorrow.

Earth Hour would only have a point it it were Earth Year or Earth Decade or Earth Century anything less is just warm and fuzzy moments where we can claim to be green and pat ourselves on the back. As was said Greenwashing.

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