On 16 March Tokyo Electric Power Comanpy (TEPCO) announced that they discovered a significant increase in power consumption during the early mornings of 20 and 21 February. Those times coincided with both the women’s short program and free skate events in which Mao Asada competed. In each case the increase in demand equaled the amount put out by an entire fossil fuel power plant.

At around 3:35am on 20 February the output was a regular 31 gigawatts for that time of year. However, by around 4:20am when Mao was due to hit the ice the output spiked to 31.5 gigawatts or enough juice to send 26 of Doc Brown’s DeLoreans back… to the future.

TEPCO compared the instance with a control date of 17 January which had similar conditions with 20 February such as temperature. They performed the same analysis with Mao’s second performance on 21 February with 23 January. In both cases they deduced that Mao’s Olympic performances resulted in a 400-megawatt increase in electricity consumption.

This is surely a testament to the popularity of Mao-chan and how much the nation loves her cute facial expressions and triple axels. And to that we at RocketNews24 would just like to say: Shame on you! All this time parading around as the darling of Japanese figure skating has resulted in a massive carbon footprint at a time when global warming has never been more threatening.

We’d now like to celebrate Hidenari Kanayama, the only Japanese luger to qualify for the 2014 Olympic Games. He consistently placed around 30th in each run and did not cause any excessive power consumption from his performances. In fact, electricity demand may have gone down during them. And so we would like to congratulate Mr. Kanayama for being the RocketNews24 Environmental Athlete of the Week!

You’ll always be gold to us!

Source: Yahoo! Japan News (Japanese)
Video: YouTube – wice2016
Image: Sochi2014

There she goes lutzing more CO2 into the atmosphere…