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- photonrider
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Let There Be Darkness!
- Thread starter photonrider
- 32 comments
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- Windsor, Ontario, Canada
- Johnnypenso
I will be purposely turning on all the lights in the house tonight as a protest against the scam that is Earth Day.
Keef
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- 25,159
- Dayton, OH
- GTP_KeefRacer
- GTP Keef
So, Earth Day. It's a well-known day now and lots of things are done to celebrate it like groups cleaning up garbage, recycling efforts (I finally cleaned up all the pop cans strewn around my back yard) and other things. One effort was this "lights out" saving of electricity.
I think it's a lame effort. When you turn off a light bulb in your house there isn't some guy in the power station that says, oh, Keef just turned off his kitchen lights so we can ratchet down our production slightly. That's not how it works. An electrical power station makes what it makes based on typical demand - it might be too high, it might be too low. If it's too high, power will be transferred/sold to neighboring utilities, and if demand is too high the opposite will happen. The production of electricity is not micromanaged, especially at sources that can't be micromanaged like nuclear or wind production.
If 10,000 people here in Dayton all turned off their lights it wouldn't do anything to our local coal electrical production as the excess power would be seamlessly transferred elsewhere. If a genuinely large part of the population did it (including industry which, let's face it, isn't going to do this because they've got money to make) then there may be a problem and production would have to be halted. What this would do to the smoldering piles of coal I have no idea. I imagine it would be like a steam locomotive - the coal still burns and still produces pollution, but the steam created is simply vented off and wasted. That is completely pointless in terms of preventing pollution, obviously. More like a hipster protest that hasn't been thought out very well.
The main point I wanted to make may sound trivial to some and perfectly logical to others. Either way, I know for a fact that none of us have ever seen a light bulb go out while it was already on. I might even call it impossible. They go out all the time immediately when they're turned on because the rush from cold to hot is so stressful. My point is that even if turning off all the lightbulbs in the entire city did save pollution from production, what's going to happen when you turn them back on? Undoubtedly some will go out, and since there's a lot of bulbs in a whole city the number that go out will be rather high. And that just means they have to be replaced. And that means that supermarkets will be selling bulbs like hotcakes, and since the supply of bulbs has suddenly gone down the lightbulb industry will have to boost production to restock stores...all the little details in that process, from collecting resources to refining to producing to shipping and finally keeping the lights on at Walmart so you can buy your new bulbs will most likely cancel out any benefit caused by reducing electrical consumption. None of us can say exactly what this effect will be but there definitely would be an effect and I honestly think it's worth studying. A comparision between turning lights off and then on again to save power versus the cost of producing new bulbs when half of them go out as they're turned on again.
And this is the problem with hipster protests. They're almost always pointless. And if it does actually achieve its goal, that goal is most likely not yet economically viable.
I think it's a lame effort. When you turn off a light bulb in your house there isn't some guy in the power station that says, oh, Keef just turned off his kitchen lights so we can ratchet down our production slightly. That's not how it works. An electrical power station makes what it makes based on typical demand - it might be too high, it might be too low. If it's too high, power will be transferred/sold to neighboring utilities, and if demand is too high the opposite will happen. The production of electricity is not micromanaged, especially at sources that can't be micromanaged like nuclear or wind production.
If 10,000 people here in Dayton all turned off their lights it wouldn't do anything to our local coal electrical production as the excess power would be seamlessly transferred elsewhere. If a genuinely large part of the population did it (including industry which, let's face it, isn't going to do this because they've got money to make) then there may be a problem and production would have to be halted. What this would do to the smoldering piles of coal I have no idea. I imagine it would be like a steam locomotive - the coal still burns and still produces pollution, but the steam created is simply vented off and wasted. That is completely pointless in terms of preventing pollution, obviously. More like a hipster protest that hasn't been thought out very well.
The main point I wanted to make may sound trivial to some and perfectly logical to others. Either way, I know for a fact that none of us have ever seen a light bulb go out while it was already on. I might even call it impossible. They go out all the time immediately when they're turned on because the rush from cold to hot is so stressful. My point is that even if turning off all the lightbulbs in the entire city did save pollution from production, what's going to happen when you turn them back on? Undoubtedly some will go out, and since there's a lot of bulbs in a whole city the number that go out will be rather high. And that just means they have to be replaced. And that means that supermarkets will be selling bulbs like hotcakes, and since the supply of bulbs has suddenly gone down the lightbulb industry will have to boost production to restock stores...all the little details in that process, from collecting resources to refining to producing to shipping and finally keeping the lights on at Walmart so you can buy your new bulbs will most likely cancel out any benefit caused by reducing electrical consumption. None of us can say exactly what this effect will be but there definitely would be an effect and I honestly think it's worth studying. A comparision between turning lights off and then on again to save power versus the cost of producing new bulbs when half of them go out as they're turned on again.
And this is the problem with hipster protests. They're almost always pointless. And if it does actually achieve its goal, that goal is most likely not yet economically viable.
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