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Saturday, March 29, 2008

Earth Hour 2008: a huge success?

The above graph show the impact of tonight's Earth Hour on Ontario's electricity demand. Actual demand is shown in green, forecast is in blue. The red box highlights the hour between 20:00 to 21:00 hours, or 8:00 to 9:00 PM, a.k.a. "Earth Hour".

As you can see, "Earth Hour" had practically zero effect on the electricity demand in the Province of Ontario. While electricity use was barely below forecast, it was actually up slightly from the previous hour!

Update: The numbers continue to come to light (pun intended), so here's a quick roundup of some analysis on the impact of yesterday's Earth Hour:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey moron, it was an awareness program not a savings program. Thanks for the free coverage

Anonymous said...

Earth Hour is idiotic... and dangerous. By stated facts, dividing down Australia's gross national product, if every city in Australia were to participate in Earth Hour it would cost an estimated $50,000,000.00 in lost productivity, even at night. That is the salary of 1000 jobs for an entire year! All to stave off how much pollution exactly?

Enough to fill one medium sized thimble. That's right.

That is the consequence of Gunpoint Environmentalism: Poverty.

John M Reynolds said...

The sun sets at 7:50 in Sudbury Ontario. It only makes sense that 8-9 will need more lights than 7-8. The temperature also dropped a degree, so the furnaces would have to work slightly harder too. Do you have the numbers to compare 8-9 to 9-10? I checked the graph of yesterday and the 9-10 period went up slightly. Too bad they don't let us see 2 days ago, so we could compare, but just yesterday's data shows little difference. The case could easily be made that people were out until 9 when stores closed so demand would increase after 9. I saved a copy of the graph if you want to see it.

A Dog Named Kyoto said...

Good analysis John. It's pretty clear that the effect was negligible. What a colossal waste of time.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for pointing out yet more evidence to prove the utter pointlessness of Earth Hour. Hopefully, more people will be able to see its futility the next time it comes around.