Earth Hour

A couple of weeks ago a global action called Earth Hour took place around the world. The idea was to turn off the lights for an hour between 8 and 9 in the evening. This year I was not at home at that time, so I couldn't take part, but I took part at this event two years ago. One of my colleagues at work argued this event is useless and even damaging as the electricity was still produced and wasted since you cannot stop an electrical generation facility for just an hour to make up for the lower demand. And since electricity cannot be stored it ends up wasted somehow in the system. I know this might be true from a technical point of view, although I might imagine somebody else (like a processing plant) could have scheduled some activity at that point to use the excess electricity, but the real meaning of this event is to make all of us aware of how much electricity we consume and many times just waste. For example, I know the TV consumes quite a lot of electricity while in stand-by mode and I started a while ago turning off the TV from "the button" (not by remote control) when I leave in the morning. So all of us should start thinking how to lower our electricity consumption. And that hour when you were supposed to sit in the dark was a good time to think about such things.