Planet Relief Big "Switch Off" Switched Off

The now defunct Planet Relief and its predecessor Live Earth, had both planned for a big switch off. The idea that thousands of households around the country would switch off simultaneously in a grand gesture to save the planet. Cameras positioned in prime aerial city locations around the UK would watch as the UK switched off and the ensuing blanket of darkness would cover the UK, saving energy, CO2 emissions and well the planet for a few minutes. Or so that was the plan, in reality such actions are like playing Russian roulette with the countries energy supply, and may end up doing more harm than good. The plans even had the National Grid nervous.

The reasoning, that the unpredictable demand for power could lead to households losing power, and wasted energy, resulting in a likelihood, more emissions being created than saved. Not to mention the irony, a television station asking viewers to switch off.

Surges of electricity are not uncommon for the National Grid, but a mass exodus of power consumption is. Surges often range from 300MW, 60 times the maximum output of the RePower 5MW wind turbine, to in excess of 3200MW. These are normally down to what are known as TV pick-ups. The National Grid faces a constant challenge. It must provide enough energy, and not too much, and it must keep the frequency at 50hz.

"The way to think about it is to imagine you are in your car and your challenge is to keep the car at exactly 50 miles an hour. You press on the accelerator as you go up the hill, and you ease off on the other side. A TV pick-up will give you anything between 200-400 [extra MW] if it's not a major storyline; for a main character being killed or a wedding with a lot of hype 700-800. If the analysts' predictions are more than 300MW out, the incident might be investigated. We can't store electricity in any great quantity, so we have to forecast second by second, minute by minute. You base that on what did it do yesterday, what did it do last week, can you identify a day with exactly the same weather. There is a demand-forecasting computer program that looks at the corresponding five weeks over the past five years. And better still there is an analyst who tackles the TV listings every day and tries to predict the spikes. There will be somebody now looking at this evening's television schedules and forecasting what the control room should expect. Saying we want to switch off everything now is not going to be sustainable and is very, very unpredictable. You would create far more carbon [emission] than what you would actually save."
Alan Smart, Operations Manager, National Grid

Whilst I am somewhat happy to see the demise of Planet Relief, I truly believe whilst the intention was good, the show would have entered into the shady saturated genre of TV appeals which have become all to familiar, added with the likely outcry of hypocrisy, again. But more to the point the likely reason it was scraped was the miserable viewing figures for events like Live Earth which were also broadcast on the BBC and the public desire for factual programming to disseminate the information.