It’s Getting Hot In Here: Brooklyn Electricity Demand Spikes
June 14th, 2008 by Ethan
NYT: NYC Switches on the AC (Click for larger version)
h/t: SustaiNYC
“1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!” Exclaimed Christopher Lloyd’s character Dr. Emmett Brown, famously, in the 1985 film Back to the Future.
According to an article in the NYT, last Tuesday’s heat-wave-induced electricity demand peaked at an unruly 12,987 megawatts.
Okay, so you can keep your plutonium pants on, it wasn’t even close to a gigawatt (a mere .01 gigawatts). But it still sounds like a lot of megawatts, because it is a lot of megawatts.
[Ed note: Actually, I was mistaken, 12,987 megawatts is 12.987 gigawatts... Either way it is a huge energy demand.]
Con Ed said that Tuesday’s single-day electricity usage set the record for any day in June. Even more shockingly, it was the fourth-highest day in the company’s history.
Climate change? Absolutely.
Is energy demand a major problem? Yes.
Is coal-fired power giving us poor air quality and poor health as a result? Yes!
Is there a way to solve it? Absolutely.
GBK agrees verbatim with Ben Jervey — of SustaiNYC and Green Apple Guide fame — that, in addition to major energy conservation awareness and a proliferation of green building techniques, we need “widespread implementation of distributed, clean energy generation.”
We also agree with Mr. Jervey that there is no better campaign to promote clean, locally-produced renewable energy than Solar 1’s excellent new I Heart PV initiative to promote photovoltaic (PV) solar energy in NYC and NYS.
Stay tuned for more about I Heart PV as GBK, Solar 1, and other power players — pun partially not intended — in the NYC green scene team up to promote the use of solar power in NYC.
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4 Responses to “It’s Getting Hot In Here: Brooklyn Electricity Demand Spikes”
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June 15th, 2008 at 7:13 am
Check your math. 12,987 megawatts is over 12 gigawatts, or 12 billion watts. No one wants to argue with clean and green but how do we do 12 billion watts when the sun ain’t shining??
June 15th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Thank you for the correction Mark. I noted it in the article.
As for how we are going to reduce demand, you don’t have to “argue with clean and green.” Here are the results of one organization’s work in retrofitting older buildings, the Community Environmental Center, based in Long Island City, NY:
Solar 1 says this about NYC’s solar potential:
Add to solar the energy derived from wind power, tidal power, geothermal power, and so on… and with a wide variety of distributed renewable energy generation — along with energy conservation and green building — we can dramatically reduce energy from coal-fired power plants. At the same time, these new clean energy initiatives will reduce pollution from dirty energy (which has a ripple effect on air quality, health impacts of pollution, and greenhouse gas reduction), create new local jobs, save building owners and energy consumers money, and help clean the environment.
Basically, there is no need to argue against green and clean when you take all these factors into consideration. All of these initiatives are “the right thing to do” and we all need to help by spreading the word about things that we can do right now in our homes and lives to reduce energy demand. That is the first step, and the larger issues will come when people begin to demand clean energy, as they have started to do all around the country.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Someone invent a solar powered air conditioner!
July 24th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
[...] use is going to be setting record after record as our summers grow hotter and more people switch on their A/Cs for longer periods of [...]