Part I

Full disclosure: This is an informal exploration I personally took on.  There are many factors I may not have taken into account and bits of data I do not have access to.

As I said last week, I would like to take an informal look at the effectiveness of Earth Hour.  I began by writing a VI that would log some real-time information from the ERCOT* web site.  This VI would fetch the page from the site every minute, parse it to find the relevant bits, and then write the information to a file.  A picture of the VI is below:

Of course, the most interesting bit is the system demand.  That is, how much power is being consumed at any given time?  I graphed that below:

For those interested in other bits of data (frequency, total generation, amount of power generated by wind, etc.) can download the spreadsheet here: Results.xls

Since ERCOT covers 75% of Texas, I also found the 28 most-populous counties, which contains 75% of the population (2000 census) and found the temperatures on the hour before, the hour during, and hour after Earth Hour using NOAA’s** web site.  On average, there was about a 6-degree drop in temperature from 7:50 until 9:50.

Why is there a downward trend in your graph?  Is Earth Hour a success? The downward trend could be part of an normal load profile, which is the trend in power consumption for most days.  Until there are other sets of data to compare the above graph to, it is too early to tell.

What do you think? From what I’ve heard, most of the load on the electricity grid consists of motors (rotating machines).  They are everywhere (refrigerators, ceiling fans, air conditioning units, elevators, etc.).  Turning off lights may not make too big of an impact.

*ERCOT – Electric Reliability Council Of Texas.  It covers 75% of Texas in terms of area and 85% in terms of load.

On Saturday, March 28th at 8:30 PM (local time zone), many will be participating in Earth Hour by turning off unnecessary loads for one hour to raise awareness for the environment.  This sounds great in concept, but many people, including myself, are skeptical about how effective it is.  For me, I wonder why not switch unnecessary loads off all the time?  After all, there are financial incentives for doing so (as demonstrated by my dinky $ 15.60 electricity bill for 131 KWh of electricity last month).

With my newfound knowledge in power systems, I have several questions:

1. Will system demand drop and stay down during Earth Hour, proving its effectiveness?
2. Will generation correspondingly drop and stay down during Earth Hour, proving its effectiveness?
3. Will the spike of loads coming back online after Earth Hour compromise system stability?

To address these questions, I wrote a LabVIEW VI that will pull real-time information from the ERCOT web site (found here: http://mospublic.ercot.com/ercot/jsp/frequency_control.jsp) and log them to a spreadsheet.  I intend to log data on Saturday, March 28 from 8:20 PM to 9:40 PM, as well as Saturday, April 4 at the same time range.  I personally wish the participants the best of luck (i.e. answers to #1 and #2 are both “yes”) and that nothing bad will happen (i.e. answer to #3 is “no”).  A good indication to system stability on the real-time information page is the frequency.  If it were to drop below a certain point, “load shedding,” more commonly known as “rolling blackouts,” could occur.

While I am here, here are some things I do to save electricity:

1. Replace the light bulbs with CFLs.  Even then, turn off lights when they’re not in use.
2. Air conditioning: @Home = 78F / Away = 82 F
3. Keep the ceiling fan on
4. Heating: @Home = 68F / Away = 62F
5. Turn off everything when going away for more than one day (e.g. it’s networking gear)

This morning, I woke up to a good friend’s Facebook status indicating that she was a victim of a hit-and-run and her neck hurts.  One of her “friends” left a comment offering to have sex with her (comment was deleted in the screenshot below).

Key: Green = Me; Yellow = Friend; Red = Foe

In an attempt to stand up for my friend, I told that guy to think before he types because several little birds tell me that copulation is a physically-stressing activity, and those types of activities are the last thing an injured person would want (for risk of worsening the injury).  Anyways, he replied some racially-charged order for Chinese food:

• Kung pao delight
• Fried rice
• Egg drop soup
• No egg roll
• Fortune cookie that says “go **** yourself”

It took about five minutes of anger before my logic kicked in.  My logic says that he wants a fortune cookie with an insult directed towards him.  Ai-ya!  What did I say about thinking and typing?!  In any case, I used to think that the phrase “think before you type” applies to issuing commands to computers, but I would like to share this lesson: It applies to real life as well.

To my friend: I hope you feel better.  Let me know if there’s something I can do for you.  I got your back.

For those who read this, please rate my English skills by leaving a comment.