Operation "5 minutes to pollute the planet"

For those who have not had the opportunity to hear about the « 5 minutes to save the planet » operation (and who could not grasp my subtle wordplay), here is a summary. The first of February, the French association “Alliance pour la planète” launched an operation called “5 minutes of respite to save the planet”. The purpose of this campaign was to ask all the citizens to shut down their electrical equipments between 7:55 pm and 8:00 pm. Here is what the NGOs have to say about the purpose of their operation (translated from French): “The goal is not to save up 5 minutes of electricity only on this precise day but to bring up the attention of citizens, media and political elites on the wasting of energy and the emergency of acting!”

Results: the consumption of electricity fell down to 1% at 7.55 which corresponds to roughly 800MW or the consumption of the whole city of Marseille.  Many cities have heard the call of the NGOs, including Paris which shut down the Eiffel Tower as well as other public buildings. Other cities, especially in Belgium, also took part in the operation. This campaign was certainly a huge success for the French association.

You may wonder where the problem is… Fact is, most of the French electricity is produced by nuclear plants (which do not pollute). The French organization in charge of carrying the electricity (RTE) had to lower the production of nuclear plants in order to compensate the quick fall down of the consumption. Obviously, when the consumption rose up 5 minutes later, it was necessary to increase again the production of the plants.

              Happy? Polluter!

But here is the problem… you cannot change the rate of production of a nuclear plant as quickly as this. So, what do you do to compensate the quick raise up of the electrical consumption? Well, you use thermal plants… which, contrary to nuclear plants, do pollute. So yes, the “5 minutes to save the plant” operation, as claimed by NGOs, was symbolic. It was a true symbol of inefficiency and of counter-productive discourses…