Last year, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney closed Walt Disney World in the middle
of March and remained closed to the public until the middle of July.
It was the first time in its nearly 50 year history that the parks were closed for longer
than a day or two.
I’ve made videos in the past that highlighted the incredible amount of power and water required
to keep one of the largest tourist destinations running, not to mention how much garbage it
generates.
I wondered, with the parks closed, how those numbers might have changed.
And I’m sure you all woke up this morning hoping to dive into the exciting world of
utility reports, so today we’re going to look at how the 2020 shut-down of Disney World
impacted their utilities.
Now before I jump into the numbers, I need to clarify that this data doesn’t come from
Disney directly.
It comes from the annual utility report that the Reedy Creek Improvement District publishes
every year.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Reedy Creek Improvement District is the special governing
district that Disney World sits within.
I have a whole other video that dives into the history of Reedy Creek, but the short
version is that it was created specifically for Disney, and Disney is the majority landowner
in the district and therefore has effective control of it.
Literally, they’re two separate entities, but practically speaking they’re one and the same.
The other thing worth mentioning is that Reedy Creek’s year runs from October to September.
So while the 2020 numbers do account for the four months that Disney World was closed,
it’s also lopsided to include the three months in 2019 that everything was normal
as opposed to the last three months of 2020 when the parks were operating at a reduced
capacity.
All that to say, the actual January to December 2020 numbers are probably a little bit lower
than what we’re gonna see today.
So let’s start off with electricity.
Disney has two on-site plants that they use to generate some of their own power, but the
vast majority of it is purchased through third parties.
Sidenote: In 2018 Disney promoted the new 270-acre solar farm on their property that
is touted to, under perfect conditions, power 25% of Disney World.
Technically speaking, Disney doesn’t own this solar farm.
It’s their land, but the farm itself is owned by Origis Energy and Disney has a 20
year deal with Origis to buy the energy the farm produces.
In 2019 Reedy Creek used 1.1 million MWh of energy.
According to averages from the US Energy Information Administration, that would be enough energy
to power the average US home for 110 years.
Oh wait, did I say 110 years?
Sorry, I forgot to do my KWh to MWh conversion.
I meant 110,000 years.
In 2020, with the parks closed for four months and rides not operating, that number dropped
about 16.5% to 977,000 MWh.
With a closer look, the months preceding the shutdown averaged around 81,000 MWh per month
while the months of the shutdown averaged 61,000 MWh.
The low point of the year was May when energy use was just over 48,000 MWh.
Water at Disney World also dropped.
In 2019 the district used 5.5 billion gallons of water and treated 5 billion gallons of
wastewater.
In 2020 that figure dropped to 4.4 billion gallons and 3.9 billion gallons, respectively.
For a closer look, Disney World would pump anywhere from 14.5 to 15.5 million gallons
per day.
During the shutdown that range was 7.8 million to 9.5 million.
Perhaps the most drastic change, however, was in terms of garbage, which makes sense
since there weren’t tens of thousands of people in the parks every day to make garbage.
The district collects both waste and recyclables from approximately 950 waste collection containers
across the property and approximately 2,500 recycling containers.
There are way more recycling containers, by the way, because they max out at those 95-gallon
bins while the trash containers can be as large as the 40 cubic yard dumpsters.
Anyway, In 2019 Reedy Creek performed 70,000 garbage pickups and through those pickups
collected just over 180,000 tons of solid waste.
In 2020 the number of pickups drastically dropped to 44,000, and that total amount of
waste dropped by just over 60% to 71,000 tons.
Moral of the story?
Guests make a lot of garbage.
When the parks are open and operating normally the district is making an average of 182 pickups
per day.
In May and June of 2020, they averaged 14 pickups per day.
So there it is.
Add it to the endless list of ways the world changed last year.
Obviously in the big picture, even in regards to the park shutdown, this doesn’t rank
very high when it comes to importance.
That’s reserved for the lives and livelihoods impacted by the pandemic.
This, more than anything, just shows that even when you close the world’s largest
vacation destination to guests, it’s still a beast of a machine that keeps on going.