» Aerial - Simon Lau

Toronto Earth Hour – March 29, 2008 @ 8PM

If you haven’t heard about Earth Hour, maybe you’ve already been living under a rock without excessive use of electricity. In which case, you’ve probably done an excellent job and keeping your carbon footprint relatively small.

earthour

In Toronto, Earth Hour was considered a huge success. I was at Nathan Phillips Square when it began and I didn’t think it was that big. The lights dimmed but around the city but visible light pollution still hung in the air. There was even a single office still lit in City Hall.

In an effort to curb the use of electricity, it was reported that Toronto’s electricity demand dropped by 264 Megawatts. The equivalent of 175,000 homes turned out their lights in a city of a little over 3 million. According to the announcers at Nathan Phillips Square, that’s a participation rate of 7% for the homes in the city.

I personally thought that was low and figured Torontoians should have done better and stepped it up to 10%.

Despite me saying the buildings around NPS were not fully dimmed out like the power outage of 2003, the aerial photographs captured SaveOurClimate show a very different story.