Next100 - A Dialogue on the Next Century of Energy

Mar 31 2008

Earth Hour Illuminates the Power of Energy Efficiency

This past weekend, PG&E joined the City of San Francisco and the World Wildlife Fund during Earth Hour - an event where cities and towns from around the world turned off their lights for an hour as a call to action against climate change.

The brilliance behind the event was its simple statement - billions of people around the world have the tools at their disposal to make a difference in the fight against climate change.

We continue to receive calls from customers and media about the event's success. Specifically, they want to know how much power San Francisco saved by turning off the lights for one hour? Based on our records, we actually could not see a noticeable difference on the power grid.

Does this mean that no energy was saved? Absolutely not. Certainly, many homes and businesses turned their lights off. But when you look at the aggregated impact on the grid for that one hour, it's difficult to accurately say how much power we all saved.

Does this mean that the event was not successful? No way. The true measure of success is how much awareness the event brought to the impact that energy use has on climate change. The event also highlighted a simple solution - energy efficiency.

We've been working on making energy efficiency "sexy" for our customers for almost 30 years. I always ask myself: how can saving money and saving the environment not be considered sexy?

We've been wildly successful providing our customers with energy efficiency programs over the past thirty years. We've helped our customers save $22 billion and helped prevent more than 135 million tons CO2 from entering the atmosphere. Yet, we feel like we're just scratching the surface when it comes to the things we can all be doing to reduce energy use.

Which is why we're always looking for interesting ways to make energy efficiency visible. Last October, we participated in a similar event called Lights Out San Francisco. We also partnered with the Sierra Club to give away one million compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL's) during the 2007 October Energy Awareness Month. To date, we've pushed more than 30 million light bulbs since 2000.

Another interesting side note is that San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin recently proposed a measure to reduce energy use in the city's buildings during the night time.