Thursday, April 03, 2008

The effect of Earth Hour

Leaving aside the debate about the value of eco-gimmicks like l'heure de terre, you have to be impressed, or at least surprised, by the level of participation.

Check out the drop in electricity demand in these cities between 8-9 pm last Saturday:

Christchurch, NZ 13.1%
Canberra, Aus 11.4%
Melbourne, Aus 10.1%
Toronto 8.7% (from typical for that time)
Syndey, Aus 8.4%
North Vancouver 7.0%
Port Coquitlam, BC 6.7%
London, Ont 5.9%
Ottawa 4.0%
Vancouver 3.4%

Seems that parts of the Commonwealth really took this initiative to heart.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

that does surprise and impress me. you know anything about what happened in the US?

Simon Donner said...

Canada and Australia were much more involved than the US. Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix and San Fran took part, but I haven't found any data on the change in electricity demand.

Anonymous said...

was at a premier of Human Footprint movie at Nat Geo yesterday (pretty good!, great visuals, tho would have liked inclusion of some commentary on how to reduce consumption/deal with the problem..) and there was a bit of info on this - at least 400 office buildings turned off in atlanta and electricity usage down 4% for the city.