Toronto’s Earth Hour

According to Toronto newspaper The Star, Toronto observed an 8.7% dip on it’s energy curve. Here is a nice comparison of the Skyline before and during Earth Hour from their website.

Another fun source of images of Earth Hour across downtown Toronto is at blogTo.com, where you can see this interesting graph of energy consumption during the day of Earth Hour. Mind you, that graph is across Ontario and so the dip may not look as pronounced as Toronto’s experts have suggested. However, I think we do see a little bit of a change in consumption right later at night. I saw a very different graph earlier today, of Toronto’s energy, but I can’t seem to find it online. Too bad.

For the curious, here is the energy consumption of yesterday, according to ieso’s website. Keep in mind that yesterday was much warmer than on March 28th, and so the comparison isn’t ideal.

You can sort of see the effects of Earth Hour on the curve, but, to be fair, the real difference is in people’s head, which has always been the idea behind the Earth Hour’s movement. So, in that sense, I think that Torontonians really participated well and even if it didn’t have quite the effect on the energy consumed of March 28th 2008, I personally think it was a wonderful event and am glad we participated as much as we did. I sure hope we do better next year though! The challenge is on!