I wonder how Mamdani will handle these situations. Does he have the authority to tell Times Square to shut down their power consumption?
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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He does have the authority to send whoever operates it a letter asking them to pretty please shut it down. Unlike with regular people however, the chance the recommendation will be followed is zero.
surely the city (not the mayor alone) can define non-essential power consumption and say "hey cut that shit out or get fined"?
I am assuming the city owns the power company. if not, wtf lol
They do not own the power company, no. ConEd is private, but the state has some authority over it.
This is not an accurate understanding of the problem. The entirety of generation capacity for almost all of electrification (except for the last few years and for a very small number of power plants) has been built to handle peak load. Peak load only exists for something like 50 hours out of the entire year. The lights in Time Square represent base load, as they are always on. Turning off the lights in Time Square would do absolutely nothing to manage peak loads as compressors are far and away more energy intensive than lighting is.
The evidence we should be looking for is whether they require turning off AC in commercial buildings during peak load. Instead what we find is that ConEd is literally paying commercial real estate operators to reduce energy consumption during peak while asking residents to do it voluntarily without offering them compensation.
That's how you know the game is rigged. Not through base load lighting, but by literally paying commercial land lords to do something that residents are asked to do for free.
The lights in Time Square represent base load, as they are always on
That's not what base load means. Base loads are loads that you cannot turn off without putting the safety and well being of people in jeopardy. The hospital is a base load. Telecommunications is a base load. Traffic lights are base loads. The subway is a base load. Water and sweage pumps are base loads. Lights in a dark tunnel or underground space are base loads. Turning off any of these will have a significant detrimental effect to the population. Billboards and decorative lights are not base loads, keeping them on is a choice, not a necessity. What detrimental effect does turning them off have?
Sure. It's intermediate load. You're correct. It doesn't change the argument. But I appreciate the adherence to the correct use of technical terminology
If the wealthiest intersection on the planet cant even pay lip service to an issue like that, how is anyone going to take the issue seriously? "You must reduce your comfort for the greater good, but the advertisements stay on" is callous and puts one of the least important things above the needs of the many. Its like saying emergency vehicles only on the roads in a snow storm, but then you see an ice cream truck driving around. Clearly, the priorities are not straight.
The priorities are off because of capitalism, not because lit signage remains lit.
It is absolutely nothing like seeing an ice cream truck on a road that's been limited to emergency vehicles.
Spending time and effort and political capital and writing the laws and regulations and doing the enforcement simply because you think the optics matter that much is just not a good use of time. If the city wants to address power usage, lit signage is incredibly low on the priority list. Meaning if the priorities were in order, lit signage would stay on and the ACs would be managed by cycling them on and off using a planned controller. Because the reality is that turning the signs off would only allow for a very very little bit of additional uncoordinated cooling systems, but managing cooling systems would allow for literally billions in savings on infrastructure investments into the power grid.
So, in fact, the signs remaining on while ConEd chases after AC management is evidence of priorities being in place correctly
The lights in Time Square represent base load, as they are always on.
I don't see how that means turning them off at peak load wouldn't lower peak load. It would also send a message that society is taking the issue seriously.
If you look at the difference between base load and peak load, it would be obvious that the lights are inconsequential to peak load.
So is my air conditioner. It's not like me turning the dial up a few degrees is going to keep the world spinning properly. /s
It's not just Times Square just like it's not just my AC. Times Square is a visual representation of how seriously the city and it's residents take the issue. If those lights are blaring, then I assume a whole lot of other corporate power consumption is likewise excepted.
That's just vibes though. Your AC is a node in a distributed cooling system that all respond to the same ambient environmental signals which means they act in a distributed coordinated manner. There are government systems for power reduction of commercial spaces - certifications, tax incentives, negawatt incentives, etc. The distributed system of ACs is almost impossible to manage because it's functionally anarchic. And the combination of your AC and all 8m of your neighbors' ACs turns out to be an order of magnitude more draw than all of the lighting in the entire city.
Society is constructed on vibes. NYC is 8 million people vibing together.
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Peak load consists of base load plus variable components. Turning off some of the base load reduces peak load.
It's actually a bit silly to call lighting a "base load". That's not how the grid works. Base load is specifically talking about the grid itself and what the lowest load is on the grid. They don't have an actuarial table where your refrigerator gets put into the base load bucket while your bathroom lights are put in the peak load bucket. It's all one load.
What power companies are looking at is the demand curve. The lowest level of the demand curve is the base load. That's all it is.
Things do get trickier with commercial power, especially when talking about machinery. But for something as simple as lighting it's completely straight forward. Turning off 150MW of lights frees 150MW of peeker capacity which can be used for more useful things like boiling water in a data center to answer questions wrong (I kid).
Yes, 100% true and also 100% irrelevant. The delta in NYC between base load and peak load is almost 5GW. And the base load itself is about 5GW. Given that peak loads happens only for 0.1% of the year, you can easily see that the problem has almost nothing to do with base load and everything to do with the rapid scaling up of peak load. This is why AC compressors are the culprit. They are fully automated, distributed, and they all kick on under shared environmental triggers. The starting up of ACs during a heatwave is literally almost equivalent to 100% of NYC base load.
Shutting off a few 10s of MW for lighting cannot solve the problem.
For sure that's a better analysis of the whole thing. Although, I do think it is worth noting how much energy is devoted to stuff like advertising, which is ultimately not productive use of energy. And if that wasn't done in the first place, there would be more energy to go around avoiding the problem of not having enough of it at peak ours.
how much energy is devoted to stuff like advertising
And stores and businesses leaving the lights on inside, even at night when the place is closed and nobody is there. And lighting up their entire giant parking lot all night as well, all night every night, even though they're only open during hours of darkness for a few hours each day.
I know it's not that much energy in the grand scheme of things, especially now that everything is LED. But still, their complete disregard for energy savings -- such that they can't be bothered to install a simple timer circuit -- irritates me.
(I suspect that they're also leaving the HVAC running at full capacity overnight as well. That might be a more significant waste of energy.)
Exactly, and that's just one example of massive waste. Another one is the fact that around half the food produced is just thrown away because it's just more 'efficient' to do that. Capitalism is an absolutely insane system.
HVAC is not left on over the weekends in most office buildings in NYC. There are incentives and certifications and standards that drive that.
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Compressor startup is more intensive than lighting. Once the compressor is running it's a pretty steady power consumption.
A window unit, for example, on startup (assuming it doesn't have a smooth start) will pull a full 20A. However, during operation it ultimately will pull around 5A.
That said, there's not some sort of special electrical budget which makes the lights in NYT come from baseload generators vs peakers. If those lights turned off, the total grid load would go down by the amount of power those lights consume. And, as it turns out, those lights are consuming around 150MW. That's ~4 steel mills worth of heat just being shoved into the atmosphere for advertisement. It's at least 1 powerplant's worth of power.
Shutting those lights off would take the coordination of something like 10 businesses vs telling the millions of residence of NY to adjust their power consumption. They absolutely would make a difference. It's not like there isn't still a base load of power needed with those lights off.
Edit: My numbers are off, it's closer to 35MW. ~1 steel mill worth
NYC has ~3.75mil housing units.
Based on your 5amp draw, thats 600w, which a bit on the low side, but we can use it as an average. Assuming most (75%) of residences have AC units, 2.775 million AC units try to run at the same time, using 1665 MW.
Also, please stop using that 150MW usage of times square, particularly if you're taking it from GoogleAI. I cannot find ANY data supporting that (see possible originating claim for its use here).
Data instead suggests ~35MW draw for the billboards, using a huge overestimation of the draw (since it assumes all buildings in times square have the same number/size of billboards as times square tower, which is false). This is ~2% of the energy required/used by AC units (not including starting draw), which is tiny.
Its worth us pushing for, but lets be clear about what kind of impact that will have on the grid.
Thanks for digging in to the numbers!
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Whoa, 150MW of lightning in just Times Square? Or is that for all 5 boros? That's a mind blowing number for lighting. Consider me moved.
Edit: oh. Just saw the other commenter breaking it down. Nevermind.
Not only that, but it also smells strongly of subsidizing corporations through lowering their electricity bill.
I don't think the consumption of even a few extra degrees of the whole population of NYC is even comparable to the consumption of Times Square.
This, summed with what @freagle@lemmy.ml has already written, should be enough to rethink your upvote to this bad example.
Power consumption is cumulative, and load shedding should start from the least necessary to most. If we're at the point where load shedding is necessary, turn off the fucking billboards first, then ask people to turn down their ACs. Doesn't matter how much or little the billboards consume compared to ACs, they're completely unnecessary compared to AC so they go first. And even after that, turn off the luxury commercial buildings like ball rooms and casinos before you tell people to turn stuff down in their homes.
As a European who has visited the US each summer for years and spent a NYE in NYC, I think the many extra degrees USians put on ate just as unnecessary.
I don’t think the consumption of even a few extra degrees of the whole population of NYC is even comparable to the consumption of Times Square.
I mean, YMMV. Lots of math behind the hardware that generates the climate, the insulation (or absence therein) that degrades unit temperature over time, the efficiency of Times Square light fixtures, yadda yadda yadda.
But there's definitely a Bloomberg Era attitude towards resource consumption that amounts to "rich people can afford to live richly, poor people must learn to live poorly". And then there's a more materialist response, which asks the question "How do we maximize the quality of life at the minimum long term socio-economic cost?"
A regional government that tackles unit insulation, efficient energy transmission, and clean power sourcing does infinitely more to reduce carbon emissions than one that just hangs up billboards saying "Please Use Less".
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On the other hand, I see the exact opposite in my town. The municipality is making decent changes, replacing diesel busses with CNG and hydrogen, setting up alternative fuel and charging stations, closing up the city center for cars, planting an absurd number of trees around anything that is renovated. The district heating plant does burn methane which is not the best but still cleaner than other options.
And then around those clean silent busses there is a sea of decade old 3 liter diesel cars that smell like a petroleum refinery, and every time it gets cold, everyone who doesn't have that district heating smokes up the entire town in a layer of fucking smog from all the fuel oil heating.
I think the average person could use a hard look at themselves too. Too many people are using just whatever is cheapest and dgaf as long as they get what they want in their life. The only time I've seen anyone consider anything else is when there are government subsidies or taxes that artificially make the sustainable option cheaper.
Just curious, where this is?
I've been playing 5ish minute songs whenever I shower recently so I don't take too long and waste water just because I want to be personally more responsible but man, it's really hard to feel it's worth caring sometimes when there's so much water being gleefully dumped into AI and various other large scale wasteful practices
It's not even just AI. I used to work at a place that cleaned rugs, the amount of water we were using each day was mind blowing. 8 hours a day 5 days a week of thousands of gallons.
Business is more important to our government than people are.
It's amusing that during WWII, the US government was unable to get Atlantic City to turn off their fucking lights at night. As a result, in early 1942 U-boats took advantage of the handy silhouetting these lights provided to sink an enormous number of ships off the coast. It also didn't help that Admiral King chose to ignore the British telling them exactly where the fucking U-boats were at all times thanks to their ability to decrypt German naval communications.
I'm actually proud of my country for slapping the shit out of the Nazis eventually, but we sure as fuck did make it harder on ourselves than it needed to be.
Pretty cool story, but it was USSR that did pretty much all the slapping in WW2. The US was a minor player at best.
It would be real easy to fix the problem. There's a handful of people controlling these industries.
I honestly have yet to see meaningful CO2e reduction methods that do not involve less consumption in some way.
Renewables help greatly.
Yes they all involve less consumption, but the ones that actually are serious have that reduced consumption as a by-product of regulating industries that are the biggest offenders. You can't "personal responsibility" your way out of climate change. That doesn't mean people shouldn't take responsibility, but they should realize that personal responsibility alone cannot solve this.
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