Electricity off one minute

If we all stopped using power for one minute, would it help?

Would we save energy if we turned electricity off one minute? Imagine something like Earth Hour, only instead of a whole hour everyone in North America turned everything off for only a minute? How much electricity would that save? Would it do us any good?

Answer from Green Energy Efficient Homes

If we turned off electricity one minute across the United States and Canada, about 8.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity that might otherwise have been consumed in that minute would not be consumed. But that doesn't mean there would be any net savings in energy production; in fact, it would probably make things worse, not better.

The US used roughly 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity in 2010, while Canada used roughly 520 terawatt hours. The average Canadian uses more electricity per year than the average American - 15,466 kWh/year per Canadian resident, and 12,884 kWh/year per American resident. If we divide this total of 4,520 terawatt hours by the days in a year, hours in a day, and minutes in an hour, we reach this figure of 8.5 million kWh. But would we save it if we turned electricity off one minute? Absolutely not.

There are two things to keep in mind here. First, when you turn something off and then back on a minute later, for some devices the savings from turning the device off may be eaten up by the cost of turning it back on a minute later. Second, our power grid can't respond to instantaneous and massive changes in demand, and must continually produce slightly more electricity than is actually needed, in order to cope with demand fluctuations.

Let's consider a few scenarios where we turn electricity off one minute, and see how that impacts each scenario:

Turn off freezer: If every freezer in North America had its electricity off one minute, none of those freezers would be operating or drawing power for that minute, but freezers have to maintain a certain temperature, and since all these freezers would be gaining some heat during the minute they are turned off, they would all have to compensate, after the power went back on, to ensure their set temperature is maintained. The same applies to refrigerators. And while you are better off to turn air conditioners, heaters, and other home climate control systems off (or set the thermostat to an energy saving level) if you don't need to use the living space for a longer period, there's clearly no savings for a one-minute outage, since any savings during that one minute will, again, be eaten up by the air conditioner or heater having to compensate for lost ground during the outage.

Turn off lights: Lights going off for one minute would reduce energy consumption quite a bit, since lighting accounts for about 9% of total household electricity usage (this doesn't account for non-household uses such as industry though). But again, reducing consumption doesn't mean production can be reduced to match, because most power plants have to maintain a steady production to respond to demand fluctuations.

Shutting down a factory: Imagine an assembly line shutting down for one minute. Would you actually save any energy? I would guess that in most cases you wouldn't, because there is a period of non-productive operation when the line is started back up again, before it produces anything (or worse, when what is produced must be discarded). Not only that, but the lost revenue from the lack of production (while employees are still being paid) would probably cost many times any savings in energy costs.

I remember the great power outage of August 2003, when much of eastern North America lost power for one or more days. One of the reasons it took so long to restore power was that most power plants shut down immediately when the initial outage occurred, and it takes several hours or days to bring a power plant back online. Chances are that if we all suddenly decided to flick our electricity off one minute, and flick it on the next, all at the same time, there would be failures across the grid either at the cutoff or when use resumed, and many plants would shut down altogether, and then take several hours to restart. That restarting period, for thermal electric plants such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, involves producing a lot of heat, without turning that heat into usable electricity. So for the 8.5m kWh of electricity saved at the wall outlet, you'd probably have the equivalent of several billion kWh of wasted start-up energy.

It's interesting to contemplate the impact of turning electricity off one minute across the continent, but we can achieve much bigger electricity savings by taking small measures that apply to a longer period. For example, turning your television off for one minute will only save at most 33 watt hours - but your wireless router probably draws 15 watts continually, and turning it off for 8 hours overnight will save 120 watt hours a day, or 44 kWh a year. This still doesn't seem like much, but as I explain in How to save electricity, tackling a number of small savings opportunities like this can have a huge impact on your eletricity bill. Instead of trying to turn electricity off one minute for the whole country, why not try what my family did, and cut your home electricity use by half for the whole year?

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