Lights Out San Francisco

Lights Out San Francisco is a citywide energy conservation event on October 20, 2007. On this night, we invite the entire city of San Francisco to turn off all non-essential lighting for one hour. To promote long-lasting energy saving, we plan to distribute free compact fluorescent light bulbs throughout the city. You may ask: what good does one hour and one light bulb do? What do we hope to accomplish?

Our city’s growing appetite for energy must be controlled to protect our planet from the effects of the climate crisis. We estimate that turning lights out in San Francisco for even one hour could save as much as 15 percent of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night. The ongoing benefits of installing CFLs in your house are also significant.

This savings will reduce carbon emissions into our air, preserve the natural resources used to produce this energy, set a positive precedent for the rest of the nation (as San Francisco so often does!), and result in ongoing reduced costs for the city, taxpayers, and businesses.

We’re asking San Franciscans to join together that night throughout the city to watch the lights go out. We’ll publish the energy-saving results on this website. We plan to make Lights Out San Francisco a recurring event – and part of a wider effort to promote energy-saving consciousness for our wonderful city.

We were inspired by a similar event recently held in Sydney, Australia, called Earth Hour. In Sydney, 2.2 million people participated. Their one hour of lights out meant that 24.86 tons of carbon dioxide were not released into the air – the equivalent of taking 48,613 cars off the road for one hour.

Of course, we’d hope for the same or better here.

How can you get involved? We’re glad you asked. Your support is critical to making Lights Out San Francisco a success. If you are interested in volunteering or helping us, email us at volunteer@lightsoutsf.org and visit our website lightsoutsf.org

Lights Out San Francisco (LOSF) will distribute 100,000 light bulbs from October 1st –October 20th. The distribution will be done in a number of ways including LOSF specific tabling at shopping plazas, BART Stations, etc…, tabling at events such as Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, distribution to LOSF participating restaurants, hot spots (Safeway, Sports Basement, Gap) and distribution to churches , employees of businesses, members of non-profits around the city, and through residential property managers.