An international environmental company, by reducing energy consumption, has reached Dubai. Was it worth it?

... Earth Hour was held by residents and authorities of Dubai as part of an international campaign to protect the environment, the local press said on Sunday.

According to local media, from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, almost all electricity was turned off in the city. In administrative and residential buildings, on roads and in parks, only the most necessary lighting worked.

With the support of the authorities, the Department of Electricity and Water and the largest local companies took part in the action, in particular, the Nahil holding and the Jumeirah hotel group.

Several residents of the resort area of ​​Jumeirah held a mass demonstration at the highest hotel in the world, the Burj al-Arab (Arab Tower).

According to media reports, during the “Earth Hour” Dubai saved 20% of its daily energy consumption, which will be the contribution of the city to the fight against climatic changes threatening the entire population of the planet.

Dubai was the first Arab city to launch the Earth Hour campaign, initiated by Australia.

The Earth Hour movement began last year in Sydney (Australia), where the city’s electricity consumption dropped by more than 10% in an hour of voluntary shutdown. This year, dozens of cities are participating in the action, including Atlanta, Bangkok, Vancouver, Dublin, Copenhagen, London, San Francisco, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Chicago.

The Russians also called on to contribute to the fight against global warming. According to Alexey Kokorin, program manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Climate and Energy, Russia, it’s possible to stop climate change by halving global greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the 21st century.

He recalled that the main source of emissions is the burning of coal, oil and gas, in particular, in the production of electricity. The share of emissions associated with the energy sector is very large and amounts to almost 50% in Russia, Kokorin said ...

Explain to me, is it possible to reduce energy consumption by one hour, save electricity? In any significant amounts.

As I understand it, from the fact that half a city will plunge into darkness for an hour, nuclear power plants will not burn less fuel. Well, ok, 70% of the electricity in the US is generated by thermal power plants. Are thermal power plants able to “respond” to load reduction? I am not so sure. Even if they know how to do it, what is the latency of this operation? And, the strangest thing is how quickly they can “win back” the slide.

There is another very funny moment. If citizens turn out to be quite conscious and “cut off” electricity at exactly 20:00 or even in a small interval around 20:00, then the sharply increased load on the network, which is fed by power plants with “muffled” boilers, can cause funny consequences.

If residents, for example, of the same Dubai turned off the lights every day at exactly 19:00, and turned them back on at 20:00, then the power plants (theoretically) could adapt to consumers. And so, it looks like a flash mob when the stream of the machine operator ...

The only reasonable explanation that comes to my mind is that the nearby petar stations will prepare for this flash mob and start jamming the boilers somewhere around 19:10, and then they will be launched at full capacity, after 10-20 minutes.