Jane Powerson Christmas lighting.
Despite last year's various campaigns to get us to stop consuming great gobs of energy at Christmas, we outstripped ourselves again. At 5.30pm, on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006, the national grid was crackling with an all-time high of 5035 million watts of electricity.
That figure was nearly 3 per cent above the previous year's all-time high, which in turn was up 6.5 per cent on the year before that, and that year (we're back to 2004 now) was 5 per cent up on the one that preceded it.
I stopped checking Eirgrid's data when I got to 1999, as there are only so many ghosts of Christmases past that one can investigate (and that you care to hear about), but it was up, up, up with the power every year, with one anomaly in 2003. The peak-power reading during that aberrant year was almost the same as the previous one, but it was unseasonably mild during the 2003 pre-Yule energy climax, so less power than usual was required for heating - which meant more was being used for other purposes.
In the seven years between 1999 and 2006, our annual peak energy figure increased by 34.58 per cent. And, I won't burden you with further numbers, but here's a final fact: according to Eirgrid's records, we are now topping the all-time high of two years ago most days during the festive period. What was a once-off blast of electrical extravagance in 2005 is the norm in 2007.
This year's demand climbed in the latter half of November, when - as you might expect - colder weather and darker days call for more electricity use. But the main consumer of those hundreds of extra megawatts is gaudily spelled out in lights: Christmas illuminations.
Last year our twinkly electrifications added at least an extra 200 megawatts demand to the national grid's load: half the capacity of an average power station in Ireland. Now, I'm not suggesting that any of us forsakes his or her fairy lights this year, but we could possibly have a few less of them, or switch to Led lights (which are not cheap, but they consume up to 90 per cent less electricity than conventional lights, and they last longer).
One of the most effective things that we can do to help our national power generators blast out fewer emissions is to be mindful of the period between 5pm and 7pm. During those hours, demand is naturally heaviest, as we come home and crank up the household, with our lighting, heating, cooking, and other electrically driven activities. Extra power stations have to be brought online to cope with the increased demand. And those include our creakiest, least efficient, fossil-fuel-fed generators. If we can avoid powering up these monsters, we'll keeping tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. So, when you turn on the Christmas lights, turn off the house lights for a bit, stop bashing around, and enjoy the glow.