Essentially, We already do this
Friday, 28 March 2008 by Jacob TomawThis week I have seen media reports, blog posts, and an email from my condo board about Earth Hour. This is encouraging us to turn off non-essential electrical appliances for an hour on Saturday in order to conserve power. I have three thoughts.
- I already turn off non-essential appliances, because my money is essential.
- Don’t we already do this to some degree, every day for 9 months. We call it Daylight Saving Time. The power needed for an hour of lights is not needed because the Sun is giving us light for free, much to the chagrin of the candlestick makers, so we align our clocks with our activities.
- This cannot be meaningful. The highest estimate are a 10% reduction of power consumption for that hour. One hour out of the 8784 hours we will have this year. After the hour everything goes back to normal. Why not encourage people to give up energy all together?
March 28th, 2008 at 21:11
Actually, I recently saw an article (http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120406767043794825.html) that suggested that Daylight Savings Time actually costs MORE energy because of the heating costs of getting up an hour early on cool mornings and greater use of air conditioning in the evenings. Possibly this is in fact just in Indiana, but this suggests that maybe we all ought to stop blithely drinking the DST Kool-Aid.
Happily writing from Thailand, where the daylight is left alone,
JJ