Interesting observation. I just came back from Australia, and Earth Hour has been advertised front and center there, while you’d have to look out for heavy advertisements here in New York. But on a related note, I attended an excellent talk by Massoud Amin from the University of Minnesota a few weeks ago, and he presented a concept called “Prices to Devices”. The basic idea is that as long as consumers have to make manual decisions about energy consumption you will not shift the demand curves significantly. But if you can introduce flexible pricing, and distribute the pricing information to the consumption units (dishwashers, A/C units etc.) then sufficiently intelligent devices will be able to schedule themselves based on the market rates of electricity. ESRI published a thorough whitepaper on this, it can be found here.

Best

Michael