Earth Hour – What does it accomplish?
So, a while back, my significant other switched off the lights to initiate Earth Hour at home. Now in that process we got into a little discussion on what the Earth Hour truly accomplishes. And a brief google search revealed a whole host of misleading information confusing electricity consumptions saves with electricity generation.
Hence, this clarification. A decrease in Electricity consumption for an hour does not directly result in a decrease in carbon emissions.
We generate electrical energy by mostly burning hydrocarbons, principally coal. In the process, we end up releasing a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since we haven’t yet developed the capability to store this electricity effectively for later use, we must consume it or allow the energy to go waste. Since power generators will always generate a base load of electricity, there is no way that switching off your lights will directly impact climate change. Since power generators are unable to predict/react effectively to a dip in demand, switching off your lights is likely to have a much smaller effect on climate change than you would imagine.
What you accomplish though by switching off your lights is send an important signal to governments and organisations worldwide that Climate change is a popular concern. And that their performance in the future might be measured in terms of their ability to deal with this challenge. So, switch off your lights, please.
Could you explain this in greater detail? You say that power generators will always generate a base load of electricity. But does that mean that the same amount of power is generated 24×7, all year round, regardless of daily, weekly or seasonal variations in demand? Surely the supply must be adjusted at some interval.
According to Wikipedia, always an infallible source, base load is about 35–40% of maximum load. Why doesn’t that mean that if consumption during Earth Hour is above the base load, then the amount of electricity actually produced will fall if everyone switches off their lights, at least to the level of the base load? What assumptions about the mix of non-baseload generating capacity are required to deliver the result that switching off lights will not impact climate change at all?
Let me try and explain it in this way. The connection between generation and consumption is in terms of “predictability” – the ability to predict a dip or a spike and “reactability”- the ability to react to changes in consumption.
As I understand, the way electric utilities predict how much energy is going to be consumed at a particular time in the future, is through regressions where the primary dependent variables are temperature, weekend vs weekday and perhaps some time series analysis. Since there is not enough prior history associated with the earth-hour, they may not have been able to predict in advance what the expected dip could be like.
As far as reactability is concerned, as I understand, utilities are just not equipped to deal with small dips during non-peak hours, especially a dip whose length is relatively small. I don’t have the exact numbers – but I would assume utilities would have had base load generators and at the most intermediate load generators running. Even for intermediate load generators, it is not cost effective to switch off and switch on for an hour.
But I should clarify one thing, ‘not all the energy not consumed will be wasted’
the excess energy generated would probably be sold at heavily discounted rates to a energy storage company. This stored energy can be used to handle future demand spikes. But since we are so inefficient at energy storage, most of the energy is going to be wasted.
Isn’t it then a bit of an exaggeration to say that “no way that switching off your lights will directly impact climate change”? What if a couple of grid operators read the newspaper and took into account the effect of Earth Hour, however small, and shutdown a couple of natural gas fired turbines used for peak load during that hour?
Pertinent point. Post revised appropriately.
To your second question, it is unlikely that gas fired turbines are running at that hour(saturday evening – nobody is working at that hour). But theoretically speaking, if they had gas turbines on they could do a hot shut-down.
So next year they should schedule it for peak load?
No. Because they cant react to dips during non-peak hours