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This is a blurb I just received from our Environmental & Sustainability Initiatives Unit. I think a 9% drop is significant but, as they say, it should be all the time!
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Well we are well and truly into the last 48 hours of rallying for Earth Hour. Earth Hour is about creating awareness and in particular we want Earth Hour 2010 at UOW to be about switching things off.
Champions, we need you to chat with staff, make the pledge and check things are off in your building. From Monday 29th we will start running the building by building reports to look at how energy consumptions changed, and stack up the behavioural reports on what each areas did to participate.
Further, please remember UOW measure this over the whole weekend not just that one hour so we can learn more about our typical weekend energy behaviour. The goal of Earth Hour for the ESI team is to better understand the energy baseload over a weekend, better understand the barriers that exist for staff and students in terms of switching things off .
Last year we ditched 9% of our energy usages purely by changing the behaviour of people when they left on Friday. We have not seen that type of saving again since March 2009. In March 2010 we not only need to crack the 9% but ESI also need to learn how to move us closer to reducing that amount of energy every weekend.
Ultimately….does one weekend per year make an energy difference ?– arguably no. The difference that weekend makes is about awareness, education and the possibilities that exist with action. It’s about looking at the bigger picture.
Please make sure you are considering the bigger picture on Friday afternoon and switch something off. From there ESI will use the behavioural information and energy data we get to look at how we make energy saving behaviour, simple, actionable and sustainable.
Earth Hour shows us what is possible - Earth Hour is an opportunity to set a target. So, we are asking everyone to show us what is possible.
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