Posted by Jess
30 Mar 2011

A little bit more on energy conservation efforts here to help delay power outages to the Tokyo area and to save electricity for when the summer comes and we all want to turn the air conditioning on:

My office is in a 9 story building.  My company occupies 3 floors of the building and there are various other tenants on the other floors.  In order to reduce electricity usage, the building is doing the following:

• two of the six elevators will be out of service
• we have one escalator betweens floors 1 and 2 - it will not be running
• the tv monitors next to the elevator bank on each floor will be turned off
• only half of the lighting will be on in the common areas
• temperature will be set differently to use less power

Our office added on to this message with the following tips (which is all things we should be doing anyway!):

• turn off the lights, projectors, a/c for all offices and conference rooms when leaving them
• turn off monitor power at night
• the a/c and lights were set to come on at a certain time, but now people will need to turn them on when they arrive
• turn off all lights in your area if you are the last one to leave
• temperature will also be set differently to use less power

Other things I've noticed around town -

• the convenience store in our building only has half its lights on 
• the big tv screens that usually run ads at my train station are off
• stations have some escalators running, but some are shut down
• the big billboards near our apartment are turned off

So while most people are making a concentrated effort (as am I - how much light does 1 little person really need anyway?) some people still surprise me.  Some people come into the office and switch on the light when it seems like the sunlight is more than enough to work by...but to each his own!

Kanpai!
Jess