Eiffel Tower’s lights are being turned off several hours earlier than usual to save energy.
Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo stated this today as the capital city of France has joined a nationwide initiative to reduce electricity consumption by a tenth.
Normally, lights at the Eiffel Tower go out at 1 a.m. but this schedule will be brought forward to 11:45 p.m. and it will be the time to close Tower for the visitors, leading to 4% consumption of electricity.
According to Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the other measures to cut electricity consumption in the city include switching off lighting in public buildings at 10 p.m. and reducing the temperature in those buildings to 18 degrees Celsius.
Paris’s efforts are similar steps the European Union is advocating to tackle its energy problem. Besides turning the lights off on public buildings and historical landmarks, elsewhere, such as in Germany and the Netherlands, the government officials are advising people to take shorter showers to save energy and are lowering the temperature of swimming pools.
These are all a part of efforts to reduce energy consumption across the bloc by 15 percent, per plans laid out by the European Commission last month. Yet pressure is mounting to turn these cuts into reality, with the Commission earlier this month proposing they were made obligatory rather than voluntary, which was how they started.
The EU is also planning a direct intervention into the bloc’s electricity markets amid a liquidity crunch threatening scores of energy trading firms.
