Earth Hour haters are still getting all “sanctimonious” about the weekend’s conservation event, and some are trying hard to discredit it.

Andrew Bolt compares NSW power consumption graphs covering Earth Hour and yesterday’s Sydney CBD blackout and smells a rat.

Earth Hour at 8.30pm Saturday barely registered on NEMMCO’s graph of electricity demand:

Yet what wild – andd (sic) patently false – claims of success were made by the Sydney Morning Herald:

In Sydney, 50 per cent of people said they had turned off lights or appliances to show support…

Believe that? Then check what a real Earth Hour or Two looks like – when just 5 per cent of Sydney’s more than 1,500,000 households are forced to switch off not just a light, but everything for two hours from 4.45pm:

POWER has been restored in central Sydney following a massive outage which left large areas of the city without electricity.

About 70,000 homes and businesses were affected, mostly in the CBD’s north and some surrounding suburbs

If the second graph shows what a cut of power to just 70,000 households (with fewer than 200,000 people) looks like, how can the Sydney Morning Herald seriously claim that the first graph shows more than 3.3 million NSW residents switching off for Earth Hour?

Let’s look at this step by step. The Earth Hour graph shows a drop of about 100 units of juice for about thirty minutes during Earth Hour — presumably people did their symbolic bit for a half hour and then turned the lounge room light back on. The SMH‘s figure of 50% of Sydneysiders is based on what people said they did, and figures gleaned from a survey should be treated as rubbery at the best of times (just look at political opinion polls.) Even if 50% of Sydneysiders (and a much lower percentage of rural and regional NSW residents) participated in Earth Hour, the campaign requires them to make a symbolic gesture and turn off some lights. A household participating in Earth Hour would likely switch off a couple of 100W light bulbs or a couple of 12W energy efficient light bulbs, but still drawing power would probably be a fridge and a dozen or so electrical appliances on standby.

Most importantly, even if 100% of households participated in Earth Hour there would still be a massive draw on the state’s power resources by Sydney’s CBD. Think of all those multi-level office blocks running lights, air conditioning, elevators, computers and countless electrical appliances 24/7. Not to mention every single street light and traffic light across the state. When the CBD and surrounds blacked out yesterday afternoon, all of these were suddenly turned off while offices were packed with workers sitting at powered workstations and using the significant powered infrastructure that exists in the city to service them. So no wonder there was a drop of about 500-700 units during the outage.

Andrew claims that the second graph shows a loss of power to 70,000 homes, but it was actually 70,000 home and businesses — 70,000 electricity clients. A house of four people draws a metric shitload less power than a Sydney CBD business employing dozens or hundreds of people.

Comparing Earth Hour and the Sydney blackout is comparing apples and oranges, and conclusions drawn from the comparison aren’t worth the electricity required to display them on a computer screen.