And so we observed Earth Hour yesterday. Last year we had a 'Batthi bandh' campaign. But congregating at one place by lighting up several candles for an hour sounded a bit paradoxical and over-the-top. And did it make sense?
As per official sources, India, Asia’s third largest economy, faced a power deficit of 73,050 million units between April 2007 and March 2008. Due to this shortage+%28WinCE%29.jpg)
we have something called load-shedding in several regions of the country every day. If we take this load-shedding into consideration, in the area where I stay, we observe Earth hour for 2 hours every day. In some areas, it has been as high as 9 hours. And in some other areas power is available for only 9 hours. So for me, Earth Hour in this part of the world simply didn't make sense.
But since I have been hearing and seeing advertisements about Earth Hour in TV channels, Internet, hoardings/billboards, re-tweets and every other medium of mass communication available plus the fact that significant amount of kilowatts of energy had been spent by roping in celebrities, tigers and the rest of the earthlings, with pangs of guilt, I did switch off as many lights as possible. But not all. I simply don’t believe that burning a candle or bumping into people and furniture for an hour is a good way to save power.
Having said that, Earth Hour can act as a good eye-opener for people who are not aware (or pretend to be unaware) as to what it takes to produce that one unit of power which they consume. And truth be told, people conveniently forget, overlook or simply ignore that there are better ways to save power because they feel that all those power-saving techniques do not apply to them as they don’t consume as much as others do or do not want to care since no one else does. But from my own experience, I’d say that they would be in for a pleasant surprise.
For starters, for more than three years now, we have slowly replaced all the regular electric bulbs in our house with CFLs. Agreed that disposing CFLs has environmental consequences after they are burnt out, but while they last, they are real power misers (Hopefully LEDs will take over soon). Though CFLs are expensive but even after considering the cost of the CFLs, since they tend to last much much longer than a regular filament bulb (one CFL actually lasted us for a little over three years) they are actually value for money. And for those rare occasions where we need brighter lighting we have the regular fluorescent tubes or tube lights.
Another way of saving energy has been to switch off and unplugging appliances (including this laptop) and chargers when not using them. Seems that if you leave some appliances on standby they still consume almost 85% of the power which they would use when they are switched on. But I think that a significant improvement has been because of the increased usage of CFLs. The electricity bill has come down by 50%. Yea, 50%. And considering the fact that power per unit in our area is not very cheap (compared to many other places) these are significant savings.
So, though we haven’t done anything that can be described as new and not contributed to Earth Hour the way we were supposed to, we have been significantly contributing to the Earth in our own little way not just for one hour but for several months now. After all, power saved is power produced, and we understand that.
As per official sources, India, Asia’s third largest economy, faced a power deficit of 73,050 million units between April 2007 and March 2008. Due to this shortage
+%28WinCE%29.jpg)
we have something called load-shedding in several regions of the country every day. If we take this load-shedding into consideration, in the area where I stay, we observe Earth hour for 2 hours every day. In some areas, it has been as high as 9 hours. And in some other areas power is available for only 9 hours. So for me, Earth Hour in this part of the world simply didn't make sense.But since I have been hearing and seeing advertisements about Earth Hour in TV channels, Internet, hoardings/billboards, re-tweets and every other medium of mass communication available plus the fact that significant amount of kilowatts of energy had been spent by roping in celebrities, tigers and the rest of the earthlings, with pangs of guilt, I did switch off as many lights as possible. But not all. I simply don’t believe that burning a candle or bumping into people and furniture for an hour is a good way to save power.
Having said that, Earth Hour can act as a good eye-opener for people who are not aware (or pretend to be unaware) as to what it takes to produce that one unit of power which they consume. And truth be told, people conveniently forget, overlook or simply ignore that there are better ways to save power because they feel that all those power-saving techniques do not apply to them as they don’t consume as much as others do or do not want to care since no one else does. But from my own experience, I’d say that they would be in for a pleasant surprise.
For starters, for more than three years now, we have slowly replaced all the regular electric bulbs in our house with CFLs. Agreed that disposing CFLs has environmental consequences after they are burnt out, but while they last, they are real power misers (Hopefully LEDs will take over soon). Though CFLs are expensive but even after considering the cost of the CFLs, since they tend to last much much longer than a regular filament bulb (one CFL actually lasted us for a little over three years) they are actually value for money. And for those rare occasions where we need brighter lighting we have the regular fluorescent tubes or tube lights.
Another way of saving energy has been to switch off and unplugging appliances (including this laptop) and chargers when not using them. Seems that if you leave some appliances on standby they still consume almost 85% of the power which they would use when they are switched on. But I think that a significant improvement has been because of the increased usage of CFLs. The electricity bill has come down by 50%. Yea, 50%. And considering the fact that power per unit in our area is not very cheap (compared to many other places) these are significant savings.
So, though we haven’t done anything that can be described as new and not contributed to Earth Hour the way we were supposed to, we have been significantly contributing to the Earth in our own little way not just for one hour but for several months now. After all, power saved is power produced, and we understand that.
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