E-day

Did you know about E-day?

Today, was E-day. Actually, Energy Day, a day to save Energy.

The theory was that for just one day, everyone in the UK should all make a concerted effort to turn off our computers when we left work, turn our televisions off stand-by, you know the stuff. By just making a few thoughtful changes to our habits that did not even affect our lifestyle the project expected to highlight how much energy could be saved if we weren't so wasteful.

E-day ran from 6 pm yesterday through to 6 pm today, so that the staggering results could be shown on the late evening news. You could follow progress, being fed from the national grid live on the website to see how we were all doing.

If you don't want to see the result, look away now.

It was a monumental failure. For most of the day the day we were running at 2-3% above the predicted energy use for the day. So late this afternoon they moved the goalposts;

"The National Grid refined their assessments, based on actual weather data, during Thursday afternoon"

Apparently it was colder than they expected. But we were still used 0.1% over the expected energy usage. Not that easy to save energy after all. Or was it simply that no-one knew it was happening. I only found out thanks to a departmental e-mail at work.

Did you know? Did you take part? Would you have taken part if you had known? Or do people just not care?