On Earth Hour

I'm not happy, not happy at all. Things like Earth Hour really annoy me.

For the uninitiated, Earth Hour is where everyone in the world turns off their lights for an hour and stands around in circles singing Kumbaya. While I am sure everyone feels really good about themselves for about 10 minutes afterwards, and it is always fun to huddle around a candle like they did "in the old days" (without the threat of a cyclone looming), it really means nothing. It is as bad as people that ride to work on ride-to-work day and think they are actually helping the enviroment. Hypocrisy at it's finest.

Instead of doing something for the enviroment once a year, and only for an hour - here's a thought, change your *daily* impact on the enviroment. Do you really need to turn the light on when you brush your teeth in the morning? How about turning your TV off at the wall so that it doesn't suck power when in standby mode? Invest in a solar pannel or three for your roof. Drive slower, coast more. Consider Carpooling. Ride a bike to work once a week.

Here's another little thing you may not have thought of. Coal power stations do not like rapidly changing loads, it is bad for their systems and they are slow to adjust, so when everyone does turn off their lights at once, the powerstation has to adapt almost instantly to the reduced load. Now you can't just stop a load of coal form burning, and you still have to provide the correct amount of power up to the point of "lights out". This means that the amount of coal being burnt by the station will be the same right up until the lights get turned off, it will then slowly decrease as the station replaces less and less of it as it is burnt. For a period of time after "lights out" the station will have an excess amount of energy being generated (by the coal that is still in the furnaces being burnt), but not converted into electricity (by turning the turbines) - This is wasted if it is sent strait to the cooling towers. If we are lucky the excess energy is converted into electricty and sent to a storage mechinism (such as a Pumped-storage hydroelectricity).

Unless power was stored in the dam, some time before the lights are set to come back on, the powerplant will start shoving more coal in the furnaces to bring the powerplant back up to nominal supply levels. This is so they are ready to power all the lights when they come back on and there is no brownout. If no power was stored in a dam the hot steam generaged by burning the coal is just shunted directly to the cooling towers, and that energy is wasted because the grid is not ready for it yet.

So, by turning your lights off for an hour, are you really helping the enviroment? Ask youself this.