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)