I don’t know how many of you know, but today is E-day. Well actually, E-day runs from 6pm yesterday till 6pm today.

It was the brainchild of scientist Matt Prescott, who wanted to launch a day of action against climate change to replace the BBC’s Planet Relief day, which was cancelled as it was considered too political. Sponsored by the energy companies, who are providing a live power consumption feed, and launched yesterday evening with a speech by the Bishop of London in St Paul’s Cathedral, and the screening of short movies in a bicycle powered cinema, the goal of E-day is for individuals and businesses to turn off everything run by electricity that they don’t need in order to show how easy it is to reduce our power consumption and thus reduce CO2 emissions.

First point: until I saw the piece on bbc.co.uk today there has been absolutely no marketing that I have seen anywhere to tell people that this day was happening. How do they think an event like this is ever going to work if it has no media support? It makes me think of Wayne’s World 2 – ‘Build it, and they will come’. Clearly they have not turned up in this case, as no one has been talking about this event.

Second point: they have put a special live feed on their web site - http://www.e-day.org.uk/index.thtml, which is also on the BBC web site, though thankfully hidden away, that shows a typical day’s consumption compared with today’s consumption, in order to illustrate how much power we are saving. Guess what? Pretty much all of today, power consumption has been HIGHER than on a typical day!

In their blurb on the site, the guys from E-day say ‘E-Day will finish at 6pm on Thurs 28 Feb. The total savings of money, energy and carbon associated with E-Day will then be calculated and made available in time of the evening news bulletins.’ Right now, the evening bulletins will either be saying nothing at all, or they will be pointing out how this is a complete and utter failure.

This is the perfect illustration of why tracking can be dangerous. It’s great to sell in an idea to a client with the added message of ‘we will measure everything to show you how much money we’ve made you.’, but it can come back to bite you if the project fails, with the client saying ‘well basically your tracking tells me that you owe me £x!!’. Basically the whole project will have proved…. nothing.

If I’d known about this a while ago – ie if it had been well covered in the press and other media – I might have suggested we try to do something at the company I work for. As it is, I find myself reacting like too many other people who still regard this as ‘somebody else’s problem’, thinking ‘what effect am I going to have, when obviously no one else is doing anything about the problem’.

 

There are now 15 minutes until the end of E-day, and after a brief dip into the ‘green’, we are again using more electricity than on a typical day as estimated by the power companies. OK, their estimates are just estimates, but its amazing how the curve of real consumption has mirrored that of estimated consumption throughout these 24 hours - all the while sticking just above. I’ve had a look on the Facebook page set up for the event, and the comments are the same there - ‘What a pity I only heard about this today!’.

 

Events like this can have a good effect, and can prove something. However they need to be organised properly and communicated properly. I don’t know how much money was invested in E-day, but I can guarantee that the CO2 emmissions generated by organising it have unfortunately exceeded those saved. What a waste.