Philippines' Earth Hour 2011 - A Success!

I woke up reading tweets from VECO on the load being dropped regarding the Earth Hour 2011 on March 26, between 8:30 pm to 9:30 pm. VECO reports:

"EARTH HOUR RESULTS: The highest load drop In the VECO franchise area was 18 MW. Thank you to all those who participated!"

"EARTH HOUR RESULTS: As of 9:30 demand for VECO franchise area dropped to 248.89 MW."

"EARTH HOUR RESULTS: As of 9:15 p.m. demand dropped further to 249.76 MW in the VECO franchise area."

"In the VECO franchise area , As of 8:45 p.m. demand dropped to 257.1 MW. As of 9:00 p.m. it dropped further to 254.68 MW."

"AS of 8:45 p.m. VECO load dropped from 266.646 MW to 257.503 MW. Thank you for your support to Earth Hour!"

So from, VECO reports, about 9MW dropped after 15 minutes of the start of the energy conservation. Less than a MW dropped at 9:00 pm. At 9:15 pm, another chunk of about 7MW was dropped. Fifteen minutes after that, less than a MW was turned off. So at the end of the Earth Hour, VECO tweets that about 18MW was conserved.

Conserving that amount of energy,18MWh, is a big pull. It is a big accomplishment. What more if we look at the overall picture in the Philippines as a whole.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figures 1-3 illustrates the load trend from the past Saturdays of March 2011. If we want to know the impact of the hour, we look at the load reduction in March 26 compared to March 19, March 12 and March 5. In this way, we are assuming that the load cycle exercised by the residential, industrial and commercial consumers are all alike. The insets in the figures shows that the hour of 8 pm to 10 pm in March 26 is at the lowest level compared with the other Saturdays except for the Luzon between the March 5th and the 26th at around 10:00 pm. 

Figure 3

A simple quantification of the load reduction is conducted by subtracting the average MW difference with the March 26th to other Saturdays in March 2011. The table below shows the numbers. All negative MW difference are good indicators. The positive number is as discussed above.

Table 1

Last year's Earth Hour seems to have failed. This year, the Earth Hour in the Philippines is a resounding success!