Throughout France, the lights were turned off for 5 minutes as a way of raising awareness of climate change

While the primary objective was to raise awareness, I’m not sure how switching off the lights would do that explicitly. However, the main electricity operator said there was a drop of some 800MW, or 1% of France’s total consumption. 800MW is a decent amount of energy – a single modern nuclear power plant generates about that much.

The question from me would be: why don’t we do it more often, and for longer? There’s entirely too many lights on at night that needn’t be.