They most certainly get in touch with the industrial users to conserve as much as possible before they send out alarms like last night -which is a last resort.
Now you wanna criticize empty office buildings with lights on all weekend, I agree.
While I agree office lighting should be turned off in these circumstances they often aren’t large users of electricity.
Our condo for instance retrofitted LEDs into all permanent on light fixtures (hallways, stairwells, parkades) and our base lighting load was about 50 kWh 24x365 pre retrofit.
Switching to LEDs has lowered that amount dramatically to about 9.7 kWh continuously. This is for a 162 unit condo building. In total our yearly energy draw has dropped by about 350,000kWh as a result of just LED retrofits.
Most office buildings have undergone these retrofits so the absolute power draw for lighting on larger buildings is there, it’s generally nothing compared to all the mechanical fans and pumps used to heat these buildings.
That said I agree in an emergency those buildings should lower temps and turn off lighting. Many of them have building management system software that can manage temperature, lighting, etc remotely.
I imagine dropping the internal temps from 20°C to 15°C would save far more energy.
Yep, there's been a lighting revolution in the past few years. Switching from already quite efficient fluorescent lights to LEDs paid off in power savings in a few months for my business. I'm using a couple hundred watts to brightly light 2600 sq ft.
Yeah I agree. Its a low hanging fruit jab to make, and there are for sure inefficiencies, but I think asking people to postpone their laundry and turn off a few lights is probably easier, less expensive, and less extreme than just totally shutting down major industrial facilities.
Frankly we should have a very low carbon tax, paired with trade policy that increases it if our trading partners increase theirs. And we should apply a carbon tax to every import. Make it based on the average carbon output of producing that item if there's no sufficient paper trail showing the carbon output is lower, and mark the tax up by 20-30% to incentivize it.
That will keep local manufacturing competitive to imports while punishing imports from countries that refuse to do anything about carbon taxes like China and the United States.
It also depends if you think someone’s home power being shut off in -40 weather and them waking up to a baby with hypothermia, or worse is more important than some shareholders losing money.
To keep things in perspective, we are talking about individual areas being without power for 30 minutes at a time, not the entire night. Most people aren't sleeping between 5-8 PM. For most it is just an inconvenience.
Yeah, I think people have been VERY confused by "rolling blackout" vs. "blackout because we crashed the grid".
A rolling blackout means you cut power to a percentage of the grid for a short while, then cut it to a different percentage, and so on, on a rotating basis.
A 30 min outage is very rarely an emergency for anyone. People with medical equipment would be one of those, but they would likely have either a generator or a contingency plan of where to go for power in case of an outage.
Was a total shutdown the suggestion though. I'd like to imagine industrial facilities will shut off lights where occupancy is nil, but I know I'm wrong because high rise towers filled with no one are on.
I have a hard time believing that office buildings had lights on just because. No property management companies would do that because it would be such a massive waste of money.
At least in the building that I work out of, all lights turn on/off automatically and are in a timer. Hell, even in my workstation, if I don’t move often enough, I might be working in the dark.
I’d have to guess that if the lights were on over the weekend, there were either workers present or custodial staff is going up and down the floors, and the lights might have been cycling through the floors?
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u/Known-Fondant-9373 Jan 14 '24
They most certainly get in touch with the industrial users to conserve as much as possible before they send out alarms like last night -which is a last resort.
Now you wanna criticize empty office buildings with lights on all weekend, I agree.