What a simple idea is Earth Hour. Once a year at the end of March, we turn off the lights and  appliances for an hour and live a simpler, perhaps more romantic existence for a short while.

Last year, when Earth Hour began in Sydney, who would have thought that 12 months later 150 million people around the world would have joined the movement for the March 2008 Earth Hour It demonstrates the power of an idea and the interest that people have in doing something positive about climate change..

In 2007, in Sydney alone, where most of the electricity is generated by coal fired power stations, that hour reduced CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 48,000 cars being taken off the road. Rough guess is that in 2008, worldwide, that figure was around 1.4 billion cars.

After the Earth Hour in March 2007, I went to the local supermarket to buy some groceries. At the cash register I commented to the cashier “I suppose you had to keep your lights on to trade”. She replied that they turned half the lights off for two hours instead of all the lights for one hour, and that half the lights were still off, as it was not yet 10 p.m.

I looked back into the store, and said “I wouldn’t have thought that half the lights are off. It looks normal and I had no trouble seeing the shelves when I was pushing the trolley”. The cashier said  ‘It made little difference to visibility. No one noticed”.

The store has such an intense amount of lighting that beyond a certain point, the extra lights made little difference to the ability of people to work or shop there. Basically, half of the lights in the store are a total waste of electricity and money – and a totally unnecessary source of CO2.

I then paid attention to the lights in shops at the big shopping malls such as Westfield. Every shop had a downlight embedded in every square metre of the ceiling, and many had lights on shelves and other locations in addition to the ceiling. Why? To light up the merchandise. It seems to be a standard part of the design of shops that lights are everywhere. Frankly, I find that appalling in the age when we are facing a climate disaster.

The simple answer if to light stores with renewable energy.

Commercial buildings could take a leaf out of Wal-Mart’s book in the USA. Wal-Mart is the USA’s (and world’s) biggest retailer, with over 1600 stores. They now have a strategy for fitting their stores with solar panels to deliver power to the stores. They are building experimental stores to cut greenhouse emissions. And they are saving big bucks. One very simple cost saving and GHG-saving idea was to remove the lights from the drink dispensing machines located in each store’s staff lunch room. The lights in the room allowed staff to see whether they were buying a Coke or a Pepsi, so some one figured that the lights in the machines were not essential. In fact, they were a waste. They removed the drink machine lights. The annual cost savings from that single idea was $1 million.  And reduced their carbon footprint by around 4,000 tonnes.

Shareholders of the world unite! How many companies in which you or your investment fund or pension/superannuation fund hold shares leave lights blazing all night, 7 days a week, when no one is in the building. Makes the city look pretty. And it’s killing us. And killing profits. That money goes to the utility corporations or governments that own the utilities, and the vast majority of lights are burning energy that creates CO2.  All for nothing.

Every business on this planet could save money by cutting unnecessary power usage and put that money to better use!.

Let me know what your company is doing about it. If your company isn’t doing anything to reduce its emissions, organise a group of interested people and management tomorrow and start finding ways to save costs. Then get the company to put those savings back into renewable energy sources for power (solar panels, small wind turbines etc) and into more efficient appliances. Then look for ways to trade your carbon savings.

It’s good training for when the Emissions Trading regime comes into effect ( see blog Jan 30).

by Christo Norden-Powers  ©2008 Spandah