Earth Hour - 4 oz cities this time!

[cahullian]

On a personal note. I work Saturday School of Community Languages and we locked up and turned off all the lights that would normally stay on all weekend.

Gazz

[Suzy_A]

This is what I emailed to the people organising the event near where I live...

Dear Lisa and Russell,

I read with interest in the ‘Fremantle Herald’ and also the same article in some other 'local' and 'independent' paper (owned by a multinational) that “Fremantle and Melville folk are being asked to switch off between 8pm and 9pm on Saturday March 29 for international Earth Hour. [People] can turn off their lights to do something about global warming…” The article also says that there will be a picnic at ParmeliaPark and a barbie at PineLakes. The picture accompanying the article shows three people in the dark holding candles.



I think this is a great idea to help Global Warming!

So, let’s see…


Firstly we are being told that to help global warming we need to sit around in the dark. Great! As for me, I’m going to turn on every light in the house that I’m living in. I’m sure my solar PV panels on the roof will generate more than enough electricity on Saturday to be able to cope with that.



Now what’s next? OK, so instead of using fossil fuel to generate electricity to generate light we are going to use … candles! Now what are they made from? Petroleum wax! Now doing a few calculations we have:


Compact Fluoro Tube - an 18 watts CFT gives about 1000 lumens (ie 1000 candela per steradian or as bright – very roughly – as 1000 ‘standard’ candles) and are about 7% efficient. In one hour, assuming the household is running on normal Verve/Western Power/Synergy electricity, and a coal to electricity conversion efficiency of 32% and 10% line losses, the 18 W CFT would use 62.5 watt-hours or 0.225 MJ of primary (coal) energy. As Collie coal contains 19.7 MJ/kg, to run the CFT for the hour would burn about 11 grams of coal and produce about 20 g of CO2 emissions. Actually it will be slightly less as some NG is also used in the fuel mix, not just coal.



Now a box of candles that I have handy, have written on the side that they burn for 4 hours. As they weight 12 grams, that’s 3g/hr and when burnt will produce about 0.5 candela (as a candela was originally defined as a sperm-whale oil candle burning at about 7g/hr) and about 9 g of CO2.


So to get the same from one 18 W CFT, we need about 2000 candles which will use 6000 g of fuel and produce about 18,000 g of CO2 or 900 times more than a coal-fired CFT.


As for the picnic and BBQ, well, how am I to get to PineyLakes?


A while ago when I wanted to get there from the PerthCity centre, I tried to catch public transport. I went to the TransPerth website and tried to work out how to get there using the ‘Journey Planner’. I typed in where I was and where I wanted to go but it just kept on coming back with bizarre routes – one was to catch a bus from William Street to Success – about 20 km past the Leach Highway/Freeway intersection, then back up the Freeway and off the Freeway at Leach Highway and get off near Piney Lakes. Trip time – over two hours.


The next best suggestion was the train to Fremantle, then a bus to Booragoon, then another down Risley Road and then down Leach Highway. Trip time – over two hours.

I thought there was something wrong with the Journey Planner – surely there must be a bus that goes down the Freeway and then off at Leach Highway – that should be about 15 minutes. But I couldn’t find it, so I phoned TransPerth and asked them. I was told to take the bus to Success or the train to Fremantle…



So how to get to PineyLakes? Drive a car! As the average car uses about 8 L/100 km of petrol and if we assume the average return trip length is 10 km, and say… 200 cars come along, that’s now 360 L of petrol and 810 kg of CO2. Then the BBQ will be burning... LPG? Another great source of CO2! And eating what? Steaks and sausages? The average BBQ steak has resulted in about 15 kg of extra CO2 going directly into the air, excluding that caused by land clearing which would be quite a bit more.



So taking all of this into account, the token gesture of one hour of switching off lights will save how much CO2 and see how many people sitting around burning candles, driving around and saying that renewable energy and energy efficiency is useless?

Regards


Susan

[gaa_ian (Ian)]

Good Calculations Susan.
One would of course burn a natural bees wax candle, and not one of those nasty petroleum based ones !
Or in the case of Astronomers, use a high efficiency low wattage Red LED.
All said it was good for Astronomy and dark skies world wide.

[Gargoyle_Steve (Steve)]

We shut everything down a few minutes early - lights, tv, computer, left only the fridges running - and went and sat out the back yard. I had hoped to see a reduction in local lighting and wanted to be out there beforehand to see it happen.

As Jeanette noted earlier it was a surprisingly cool night around some parts of SE Qld (by comparison to the last 5 month anyway) and so the temptation was there to throw some pre-gathered wood into the cast iron firepit and have a bit of a cheery fire.


However we considered the lunacy of generating smoke/CO2 this way and disregarded the idea, in the end we sat there under a non-productive (ie hazy & foggy) sky and talked - just talked - for about 75 minutes.

The only active "consuming" we did was to briefly run LED headlamps as needed while sitting in my pretty dark back yard. I wish I could say that we used my brothers solar charger & recahrgables to run these, sadly the headlampsun AAA's and we don't have any rechargable AAA's yet.

Anyway it was a pleasant hour or so, quite peaceful and quiet and relaxing(there was some gentle music from the Earth Hour party across the road a bit, where all was in darkness).


I did have the idea (remember you read it here first) that the organisers of Earth Hour should have provided a 'poster' file on the website that you could download, print out, and display in your yard to promote awareness.

Something along the lines of "March 29th, 8:00 ... Our lights will be turned off to support Earth Hour 2008 - what will you be doing?"

I hope someone from Earth Hour / WWF reads this - get the posters ready for us for next year guys!

[rogerg (Roger)]

We forgot about earth hour until 8:50ish when my mate and I had finished setting up his 15" Obsession and turned the 40 odd patio lights off and said to each other "hey, it looks a little darker than usual". Prompting us to remember about earth hour and wonder if it was perhaps result of earth hour!

Anyway, we found it quite comical that us keen astronomers had all the patio lights on during earth hour, and forgot to turn anything else off

Sorry Earth!

But hey, we're the kind of people that save electricity every other day of the year.

[§AB]

Originally Posted by Argonavis

This is hysteria gone mad.

Agreed. That's all I'm going to say, because if I get started on this whole global warming/climate change/greenie/environmentalism business, my words and conduct will almost certainly earn me a ban

[Jen]

Originally Posted by Ric

I agree with Houghy, it should be Earth night and make it every Friday and Saturday night.

That would be good value

I second that motion the sky was awsome too that night (so deep) the moon didnt come up till at least midnight

[Ric]

I heard on the news tonight that Canberra had a 73% participation rate in Earth hour.

This would explain the noticable dimming in the sky glow from the west and nothing to do with the three glasses of red

Well done to Canberra

[Jen]

Originally Posted by Ric

I heard on the news tonight that Canberra had a 73% participation rate in Earth hour.

This would explain the noticable dimming in the sky glow from the west and nothing to do with the three glasses of red

Well done to Canberra

[glenc (Glen)]

I was on the Pyrmont Bridge during Earth Hour and most of the lights on that bridge were off. Most of the city buildings were dark too. I could just see M42 with the naked eye when I shielded out the lights that were still on.