Everyone’s talking about the power outage at the Super Bowl last night. It’s generated a lot of jokes, but the wingnut blogosphere knows who to blame for it — it’s President Obama’s fault.
The rebuilt Superdome features some LED lighting and this is all that “green energy” hoodoo and Obama likes that stuff so it’s his fault. See, the Department of Energy released a statement prior to the game bragging up the whole thing:
To make this the greenest Super Bowl, the New Orleans Host Committee has partnered with fans and the community to offset energy use across the major Super Bowl venues. The exterior of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome features more than 26,000 LED lights on 96 full-color graphic display panels, designed to wash the building in a spectrum of animated colors, patterns and images. The system draws only 10 kilowatts of electricity — equivalent to the amount of energy used by a small home — and the lights are expected to last for many years before needing replacement.
So, does “26,000 LED lights on 96 full-color graphic display panels, designed to wash the building in a spectrum of animated colors, patterns and images” sound like the floodlights that went dark? No, it does not. Conservative bloggers should really try to comprehend the things they read.
The Superdome management company put out a statement saying that a breaker blew, so how would energy efficient lighting have caused that anyway? Do they think that you blow a breaker when your circuit uses too little power? Conservative anti-science is really reaching whole new levels here.
Smart people are talking about smart grids after the incident. Wingnut bloggers are not smart people.
