After all, Super Bowl ads run into the millions and here, just after the key commercial spot was the biggest ad for coal-fired energy – the lights went out.

The New Orleans power outage echoes an award winning campaign Peabody Energy has implemented at sporting events where the power temporarily goes out on stadium scoreboards before fans are reminded that coal drives more electricity than any other fuel.

Peabody Energy chairman and chief executive officer Greg Boyce said the Superdome disruption offered a convincing visual demonstration to those that envisioned a world without coal.

“Coal is the world’s fastest growing major fuel and provides more electricity than any other energy source,” Boyce said.

“Without coal you might as well turn off half the lights, not just for our favorite games but also for our cities, shops, factories and homes.”

Of course Boyce is being howled down online.

Take this article from GigaOM by Katie Fehrenbacher entitled Yikes: Peabody uses Super Bowl blackouts to push coal agenda that says Peabody has turned to the manipulative press release.

“That’s about the most disingenuous piece of advertising I’ve seen in years (about as bad as its Coal Can Do That site),” Fehrenbacher writes.

So far a balky breaker is looming as the most likely culprit for the semi-blackout.

According to a joint statement from New Orleans power utility Entergy and Superdome manager SMG, a piece of equipment designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system.

Once the issue was detected the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome to isolate the issue.

Backup generators kicked in immediately, as designed.

Entergy and SMG subsequently coordinated start-up procedures, ensuring full power was safely restored to the Superdome.

The fault-sensing equipment activated where the Superdome equipment intersected with Entergy’s feed into the stadium.

There were no additional issues detected and Entergy and SMG are continuing to investigate the root cause of the abnormality.

Regardless, the incident has given Boyce the opportunity to advance the Peabody plan that would:

• Eliminate energy poverty by ensuring half of all new generation is coal-fuelled
• Replace older coal plants with advanced technologies
• Develop at least 100 major carbon capture, use and sequestration projects around the world
• Develop significant coal-to-gas, coal-to-chemical and coal-to-liquids projects globally in the next decade
• Commercialise the next generation of technologies to achieve near-zero emissions.