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.