Image : Electricity Pylons near Charles de Gaulle Airport, France (c) Rhys Jones 2008
I was thinking the other day how much energy is wasted and was wondering if it might be able to construct a global experiment to see how much the demand for electricity generation would change if people just took a day out from their computers, TVs, Games consoles and other electrical devices.
Electricity is of course essential for hospitals, emergency services and I am not advocating a global switch off for anything essential.
The power down could start on a Friday by switching off computers and lights in offices and homes and continue over the week-end by using electricity only for essential things. Have a week-end doing something else like talking to friends, seeing your family, going for a walk, go out and take photos, go and see live music or the arts, plenty of things to try.
How would one organise such a global happening - a Facebook group is one way but ironically this is one of the tools that keeps us using electricity! How would we measure such a happening ? The hope would be that once we see the effect on demand for a scarce resource we might then be tempted to lower our consumption all the time.
Anyway I'm ranting - but I'd be interested to hear the opinions of someone else.
