Dec 8, 2007, 21:32 GMT
Berlin - Hundreds of thousands of Germans, Austrians and Swiss voluntarily switched off lights in their homes Saturday in a show of support for Climate Day of Action to accompany the UN climate conference in Bali.
The five-minutes-in-darkness campaign was intended to raise consciousness about electricity waste.
However electricity companies said they were prepared and scoffed at suggestions that the mass switch-off at 8 pm local time (1900 GMT) could disrupt the countries' national grids.
'There were no disturbances whatever anywhere,' a spokesman for the German Federation of Energy Businesses told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa after the lights came back on five minutes later.
Public officials simultaneously turned off the floodlighting of the landmark Brandenburg Gate, Bavaria's Neuschwanstein Castle high on its rock and Cologne's lofty Gothic Catholic cathedral during the five minutes.
Christian Schoenwiese, a German climate researcher, cautioned that the 'lights out' was more symbolic than a real energy saver.
He said lighting accounted for only about 1 per cent of energy use in expensively-heated German homes.
At RWE Transportnetz Strom in Dortmund, where one of Germany's biggest utilities monitors its power grid, spokesman Marian Rappl said capacity was in place to compensate the surge and there was little fluctuation.
Earlier an estimated 5,000 German environmentalists marked Climate Day of Action, halfway through the UN climate change conference in Bali, with a demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Vandana Shiva, the Indian environmental activist, told them Germany had to get behind global-warming action.
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