|
Earth Hour! (pg. 4)
|
View this Thread in Original format
| Abercrombie |
| quote: | Originally posted by Abercrombie
I'm dining at The Octagon in Thornhill tonight, right in the middle of earth hour.
I wonder what a snooty fine dining restaurant will do? |
Nothing happened. |
|
|
| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by Dancing*Queen
Yeah, but not for a few hours....almost everything uses electricity. The challenge is to not use any for a 1 hour period, so that is what I am doing :) |
Lol, this is a perfect example of how gimmicks like Earth Hour fail. The objective is NOT to "not use any electricity for a 1 hour period", it's to conserve the energy you'd otherwise be using. If you just defer your consumption to an hour before or after, you've accomplished nothing.
Now if this were a demand-management program in the middle of summer or winter, that would be a different story, and the province has actually started that with TOU and critical peaks. But this is on a Saturday night, when a lot of people are out anyway; it's clearly about total energy and not just demand.
P.S. Octagon ew. Why would you go to such an overpriced place AJ? |
|
|
| Abercrombie |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
P.S. Octagon ew. Why would you go to such an overpriced place AJ? |
Celebrating friends' 13th anniversary. Yeah, very pricey. Tommy Hunter was sitting at the next table.
 |
|
|
| Kellyboop |
Earth Hour was meant to send a public message to the participants in Copenhagen in December this year.
I don't see why people get their panties in a wad about something positive that doesn't affect them... :rolleyes: |
|
|
| smuncky |
| i had a most successful earth hour. i played madden 09 and played 3 games to go 3-0. |
|
|
| Prometheus Xex |
| I was at The Keg for dinner in Brampton and they reduced all lighting to almost zero for an hour. It made dinner more cozier though. What a different it was when they turned it back up. |
|
|
| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kellyboop
I don't see why people get their panties in a wad about something positive that doesn't affect them... :rolleyes: |
C'mon now, don't mistake detached amusement for white-hot rage. 12-step programs are positive for a lot of people but they're still pretty ridiculous/hilarious from the outside.
I thought it was ironic that two people were arguing over whether or not something qualified for Earth Hour when in fact they had both completely missed the point.
If you don't see the humour in that then I'm sorry, I'll try to be just be generically offensive next time so there's no confusion. ;)
| quote: | Originally posted by Prometheus Xex
I was at The Keg for dinner in Brampton and they reduced all lighting to almost zero for an hour. |
I thought the Keg was pretty dimly-lit to begin with. It must have been almost pitch-black? I hope nobody sliced a thumb off trying to cut their steak. |
|
|
| Prometheus Xex |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
C'mon now, don't mistake detached amusement for white-hot rage. 12-step programs are positive for a lot of people but they're still pretty ridiculous/hilarious from the outside.
I thought it was ironic that two people were arguing over whether or not something qualified for Earth Hour when in fact they had both completely missed the point.
If you don't see the humour in that then I'm sorry, I'll try to be just be generically offensive next time so there's no confusion. ;)
I thought the Keg was pretty dimly-lit to begin with. It must have been almost pitch-black? I hope nobody sliced a thumb off trying to cut their steak. |
All body parts accounted for... LOL! |
|
|
| Spam |
| quote: | Originally posted by Kellyboop
Earth Hour was meant to send a public message to the participants in Copenhagen in December this year.
I don't see why people get their panties in a wad about something positive that doesn't affect them... :rolleyes: |
Just because we stop using electricity for an hour doesn't mean the power-plants stop producing it.
And once it's produced, it's gone. You can't just store the energy to use for a later day, if you don't use it up, it'll be used further on down the power grid. If it's not used down the grid, then *poof*, it's gone.
In other words. Earth Hour 'conserved' absolutely no energy. Even worse... it was probably completely wasted.
Is throwing 100 bucks into a bon-fire a 'positive' thing to do? |
|
|
| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by Spam
Just because we stop using electricity for an hour doesn't mean the power-plants stop producing it. |
Actually, it does. Many newer power plants will adjust their output according to demand. Even if they don't, however, if you lower the consumption then you lower the losses, and therefore it doesn't take as much fuel (coal, uranium, whatever) to run.
If this weren't true, then an iPod running on an AA battery would last as long as a watch running on a button cell. Smaller load, smaller current, less heat dissipated, less power required, less power delivered. If you generate 20 MW but only deliver 10, the remaining 10 can just be recycled.
In practice you don't get the whole 10 MW back because of line losses; that's the reason for demand-adjusted output.
(P.S. In case somebody wants to nitpick here, I know that this isn't a 100% accurate explanation, but power generation and distribution is bloody complicated and I'm trying to avoid writing an entire encyclopedia article.) |
|
|
| Intangible |
| quote: | The cynics took a (well-lit?) backseat tonight during Earth Hour as Torontonians blew past last year's powered down mark on the way to a 15% reduction in electricity use. Just before 9:30 and the official end of Earth Hour the Big Board hit 2545 MW, a 450 MW drop from a typical Toronto Saturday night in late March. That's the rough equivalent of turning off 750,000 60 watt light bulbs.
From my vantage point inside Toronto Hydro's top secret control room it was obvious the extra supervisors and management types (and even live bloggers!) were on hand to see just how low TO could go.
Even with a front row seat to Toronto's participation, WWF-Canada VP and Chief Conservation Officer Arlin Hackman couldn't help but think global. "The big story is what's happening globally," he said, thinking of the roughly 4,000 cities in 80 countries participating. "It's a truly global initiative."
In fact, the WWF wasn't thinking about the drop in electricity, but how many people participated. They were aiming for a billion people participating.
Of course there's no way to measure how many people participated, so those of us in the control room eagerly watched the power load dip lower and lower, from about 2700 MW at 8:30 to about 2550 MW at 9:30. The baseline load is 3000 MW, calculated on a multi-year average for the last Saturday night in March. The reason we start several hundred megawatts below that mark is because the large commercial customers (I'm looking at you, Bay Street!) powered down in advance.
Before Earth Hour even began, we had beaten last year's mark of a 262 MW drop, making it clear just how crucial the large consumers are in making a big dent in power use. In fact, those large consumers represented about half of Toronto's decrease.
Last year Milton lead all GTA municipalities with a 15% drop, a mark Toronto has now matched. As more official numbers come out we'll see who does the best job of turning out the lights. And of course see what our minimum reduction will have to be next year, too. No doubt it will become harder and harder to go lower, but as Arlin pointed out, look how easy it is to reduce our electricity use in such a huge way.
And for all those people who deride Earth Hour as just a symbol, that's ok. Symbols are a powerful thing. Earth Hour may not change or save the world, but it's not meant to. Maybe a few more people will think about their eco-footprint, but regardless, by all accounts, Earth Hour 2009 was a huge success. |
http://www.blogto.com/environment/2...r_use_drops_15/ |
|
|
| StereoPrincess |
all you ******s complaining about turning off electrical things for 1 measly hour are such bitter people. seriously, does it kill you to go along? does it kill you to not complain about something? ing depressing. must suck to live the life you live always being ing bitter and unhappy. cheer up! hope that scowl on your face goes away.
thanks tara for the numbers. i think it worked well. good job toronto. |
|
|
|
|
