"5 Minutes of Respite for the Planet"
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 01.31.07
French environmental group L'Alliance pour la Planète is urging people all over the world to turn out their lights and other electrical gadgets for five minutes at 19:55 (GMT+1hr -- that's 13:55, or 1:55 PM Eastern time) tomorrow, February 1, to give the planet and electrical grids a break and raise awareness about global warming. The "blackout" has been timed to fall on the eve of the release of the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change, which will happen in Paris on Friday, February 2. While the event will have a much more dramatic effect in Europe (since it'll still be daylight here in the States), it's still worth lending the IPCC (and the planet) a show of solidarity and unplugging for a few minutes; we encourage TreeHuggers around the globe to mark your calendars and unplug for five minutes tomorrow. It isn't quite as wacky as World Jump Day, and, at least this time, we know for sure what'll happen when we synchronize to ease up on carbon emissions. ::L'Alliance pour la Planète via ::Hippyshopper
Giving a break to the grids? Gimme a break!!
This will definitely blow out some transformers.
Moronic.
Why would it blow out transformers? An duh, it's not really to give the grid a break. it's symbolic..
Honestly, I don't think this is going to get to enough people to matter, but if there was a widescale power-down for a 5 minute (or longer) time period, at least in the north eastern US and Ontario, you'd get another 2003 style blackout. The generators wouldn't have enough load and would go into emergency shut-down to avoid over-speed. If the load were to drop below the base-load numbers, they'd have the nukes do a shut-down as well, and CANDUs take 48+ hours to restart. It would be ugly if it worked well.
A much more useful, less destructive and more informative to both citizens and governments would be to have a full day of reduced usage -- attempting to achieve the kinds of load numbers seen in the week after the 2003 blackout -- turn off half the streetlights, turn off 90+% of the advertising light (billboards, etc.), turn off half the lighting in office towers, turn up the airconditioning by 5'C, or turn down the heat to 17'C. That would have a demonstrable, long term, quantifiable change in the power usage curve for a given control area.
Sigh. I suppose that this is the intersection between social engineering and engineering.
One can only hope that there isn't a malfunction related to this.
I don't believe that this would be able to cause any malfunctions!! That is just sillyness, as if they didn't design the system for varying degrees of useage?
I hope we are figuring time zone differences. I think PST would be 10:55am. My plan is to turn off all appliances (including gas pilots) and unplug the clocks...yes, I won't mind resetting them...big deal...and then my family and I will personally be off the grid for 15 minutes because I plan to cut it off at 10:50-11:05am.
It'll be fun, we'll make a bowl of popcorn first and celebrate a better world during the 15 minutes!
Great reminder. I'm there.
For anyone who does pull the big circuit breaker tomorrow, keep in mind just how quiet it gets. I'm talking about the interal quietude that happens . .. you'll see. It's as if someone finally hit 'mute' inside your head. You'll want to stay unplugged for longer, I promise.
On 4th November last year "The Carbon Coach" had a go at this in the UK, with a whole-day effort to minimise electricity use. The National Grid website has a real-time display of supply/demand so you could see the effect (or not as the case may be!):
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/
The Grid team also tell us that the biggest-ever change in demand happened at 11am on 11th Aug 1999...why? The UK was under a total eclipse at the time, and everybody switched stuff off (or just didn't use it) while we were peering up through our no. 14 shades! And, yes, it did go rather quiet...
I work for a Canadian, Federal, Crown Corporation, and I am pleased to report that after notifying our senior VPs and Management, the news and information to pull the plug for 5 minutes was spread through our organization and well executed.
It was great to see such response from such a large Canadian Corporation.
And yes...I can report no problems occured when the power went back on ;)