A stretch, but… 6 hours for the planet, every day?

My friend Melinda at Elements in Time has a nice post on Earth Hour here: http://www.elementsintime.com/Blog.html

A wonderful site. But I wanted to use the “earth hour” concept to return to a topic that also interest me, that of strategies for managing electrical peak-demand.

What I’ve been trying to do lately is schedule my electricity usage, to the extent possible, so that it falls outside of the period from 1 pm to 7 pm, standard time, 2 to 8 during daylight savings time (I think I have that right).  This means leaving the refrigerator closed and off, running the laptop on battery power, limiting electronic media to my renewable-battery-powered radio, and no AC until after dark. (For where I live, that’s actually when you need it for a few hours.) If I cook I use the butane burner.

My understanding is that an hour of electricity saved during peak demand is worth more to the planet than an hour of electricity saved at any other time. So in addition to “earth hour”, which is wonderful, how about shutting everything off during peak demand? It takes reworking the schedule (a good time to leave home and run errands, or take a nap) but the payback could be impressive.