Turn Your Lights On at 8pm to Save The Power Grid

While watching CNN this morning I saw a piece on EarthHour.org, a movement by various econuts to make some sort of statement about energy usage. Here's what they say on their own website:

On March 29, 2008 at 8 p.m., join millions of people around the world in making a statement about climate change by turning off your lights for Earth Hour, an event created by the World Wildlife Fund.

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.

What will you do when the lights are off? We have lots of ideas.

Join people all around the world in showing that you care about our planet and want to play a part in helping to fight climate change. Don’t forget to sign up and let us know you want to join Earth Hour.

One hour, America. Earth Hour. Turn out for Earth Hour!

Unfortunately, if this program is successful the lights might be off for a lot more than one hour. The power grid is delicately balanced between generation and usage and a sudden change in the calculation on either side can cause cascading failures of the grid. Remember what happened on the east coast when one generating station tripped offline? It caused a sudden change in the electrical loads at other stations which caused failures that blacked out much of the eastern U.S. and took hours to fix.

Therefore, my suggestion is that those of us who refuse to buy the econut arguments should do our part to save the power grid by turning on all of our lights at 8pm. That way the nuts can have their little "feel good" energy party and the rest of us will still have power when the hour is up.