[Pil-pc-oceania] Earth Hour Sydney 31 March Where does electicty go when your turn it off

[alasdair stuart]

Matching supply to demand is what the Grid controllers are paid for.
Given they had advance notice it was probably quite easy. 
Some components such as gas turbines short start /stop times.  

However there are ways to use spare power :
 Snowy Hydro regularly to pumps water back uphill, to get a 2nd run from
it, at times when capacity is more expensive.
King Island does indeed have a Giant battery which stores wind power.
( Featured in Renew and New Scientist just recently)

Alasdair Stuart 

On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 20:00 +1000, Graeme George - Earthcare
Permaculture wrote:
> Graeme
> 
> Having received several emails  about this event, I joined in  by 
> turning off all my lights for an hour on the Saturday night, without 
> much inconvenience. I hoped that lots of others would have done this too 
> as a demonstration that we can be less dependent on reticulated power if 
> we have to be. The Sunday night news in Victoria had quite a story on 
> the event in Sydney with shots of diners eating at restaurants by 
> candlelight, etc, and claims that a huge amount of CO2 was saved by 
> turning all the lights off.
> 
> Russ' post includes the quote
> 
> > In the city centre alone energy consumption fell 10.2 per cent between
> > 7.30pm and 8.30pm, saving 24.86 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being 
> > released
> > into the air. 
>  
> I didn't hear any mention of  the power stations turning any of their 
> generators off for the hour. I didn't think that steam driven turbines 
> could be shut down for such short periods, so I presume they went on 
> burning coal while everyone enjoyed the hour without electric lighting. 
> It seems quite probable that, with all the candles and gas lamps burning 
> as well as the boilers going full steam, we may have actually generated 
> more CO2 than normal.
> 
> Another quote says
> 
> > The electricity saved would be enough to power more than 200,000 standard
> > televisions for the hour and equates to a reduction of 24.86 tonnes of 
> > CO2.
> > "This is the equivalent of 48,613 cars off the road for the hour," the
> > spokesman said. 
> I wonder where this electricity is that was "saved" ? Is there a huge 
> bank of batteries somewhere that we haven't been told about?
> 
> We need to be clear about what the objective of this exercise was. As an 
> example of what potential there is to make changes it was unexpectedly 
> successful. If the objective was to save an hour's worth of greenhouse 
> gases it had no hope of succeeding and could be considered a grand hoax.
> 
> Graeme George
> Earthcare Permaculture
> 35 Deering Ave, Healesville, Vic, 3777
> 
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