If I turned you off back there

[j4]

"On televisions, for example, we would like to see labels saying 'if you watch it, it will cost x pence per hour, if you leave it on standby, it will cost y pence'. Then you can present the environmental cost in monetary terms"

But that's not actually presenting the environmental cost at all, really, is it? Unless you add "WHICH MEANS that when you sink into drooling oblivion in front of the flickering forms of minor celebrities bonking in a bath of baked beans you are not only wasting the product of several thousand years of human evolution but also SYSTEMATICALLY RAPING THE PLANET and leaving it an UNINHABITABLE WASTE LAND, you selfish cretin." Really. Is it. I mean.

That's before we get to the question of how in the name of -- well, frankly, anything you care to name -- an electric toothbrush can be regarded as "essential".

I think I'm just in a bad mood today.

Comments

Random figures pulled from the ether

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It's a deeply ineffective label, I agree; pointing out that leaving a telly on standby uses electricity to the cost, on a bad tariff, of roughly one Yorkie bar a month just isn't very striking.

... didn't Cadbury's have to dispose of a huge amount of defective chocolate a few months back? I sense a missed opportunity for an advert, a million pounds worth of real chocolate bars in a heap would be a striking image of what a million wasted pounds really means.

Households use a surprisingly small amount of electricity - a bit of Googling suggests the average household electricity use in Britain is 4500kWh per year, which is about 500 watts, totalling 13GW. Losing five watts of consumption per household would be a 1% cut, 130MW, and let you close this (http://www.eon-uk.com/602.aspx) power station, though the inhabitants of the Isle of Grain would consider themselves victimised if the posters got that specific.

http://www.aepuk.com/need_info.php#20 takes me to http://www.aepuk.com/faq_pdf/dukes_2005_5.11.xls (an abomination - who puts repeating headers in a spreadsheet?) suggests there are 243 power stations in the UK, with a capacity of 77GW at peak (the 52 big ones add up to 65GW), of which we use 46GW on average.

Per-household power consumption would have to go down by 25% to allow Drax to be shut.

Re: Random figures pulled from the ether

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Or by about one-seventh to put me out of a job.

I think you could probably sell this to the Countryside Alliance and the like by expressing the savings in terms of wind turbines, especially if you used pictures of the really old, ugly, wimpy ones. Then you truthfully could say "The whole village changing to low-energy bulbs would obviate one of these", for a suitably sized village.

of which we use 46GW on average

That doesn't look right to me; I'd be prepared to go along with "On an average day, demand will peak at 46 GW", though. There are many occasions overnight in summer when the country happily chugs by on under 20 GW. The figures are in the public record; you can see them here (http://www.bmreports.com/servlet/com.logica.neta.bwp_StaticIndoServlet?param1=NRT) and dig through the database, but from memory, I don't think we've got above 58-59 GW yet at all in this abnormally (probably record?) mild winter. Yet.

I can happily go into more non-confidential power station geekery on demand!