Opera House glows green for Earth Hour Glowing green: The Sydney Opera House. The Sydney Opera House has glowed green while much of Australia plunged into darkness as the country united for the Earth Hour campaign on climate change. Thousands of households and businesses across Australia switched off their lights at 8.30pm in an hour-long show of symbolic support for the planet. And in a break from the usual Earth Hour protocol, selected venues - including the Opera house and the Arts Centre Melbourne - glowed a dark green to represent the campaign's push for people to embrace renewable energy. The Australian event will trigger a global switch off, with hundreds of millions of people in more than 150 countries set to turn their lights off. Organisers say Earth Hour, now in its seventh year, has captured the imagination of environmentalists everywhere. "What started as an event in Sydney in 2007 with 2 million people has now become a tradition across the country and across the world," Dermot O'Gorman, head of the World Wildlife Fund-Australia, said. It's now an organic, people-powered movement ... which is fantastic. In addition to dimming the lights, Australian Earth Hour celebrations included various community events, such as street festivals in Sydney's Newtown, large concerts in Perth and bushwalks in Canberra. With restaurant diners eating by candlelight, outback communities going dark and iconic buildings standing in shadows, Mr O'Gorman believes Earth Hour has played a part in drawing attention to energy use. "We've always heard anecdotally that it has made people change their actions and look at their impact on the planet in a more considered way," he said. Earth Hour has always been about empowering people to realise that everybody has the power to change the world in which they live, and thousands of people switching to renewable energy is a perfect example. Sydney's lights out example will be followed by countries and territories across the globe. Russia will turn off the lights on the Kremlin for the first time as part of worldwide events for the Earth Hour campaign against climate change, officials said. The lights illuminating the red brick walls of the iconic landmark in the heart of Moscow will be shut off for an hour starting at 8.30pm local time (0330 AEDT) on Saturday following a decision by President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said in a statement. The lights will remain on the Kremlin clock and the Russian flag and glowing red stars that top its towers, a spokesman for the presidential administration, Viktor Khrekov, told RIA Novosti news agency. The floodlighting of the onion-domed St Basil's Cathedral, which stands just outside the Kremlin walls on Red Square, are also to be turned off, along with about 90 other landmark buildings in Moscow, with the switch-off shown live on Russian television. Earth Hour organisers expect hundreds of millions of people across the globe to turn off their lights for 60 minutes on Saturday night in a symbolic show of support for the planet. Russian astronaut Roman Romanenko, part of the team at the International Space Station, appealed for broad support of the event, now in its seventh year. "From here in space we can see very well how much our planet needs protection," Romanenko said in a video statement from the ISS posted on YouTube. Its life depends on us, how we treat it, and use its resources. Support the Earth Hour at 8.30 pm on March 23 as a sign that the fate of our Earth is important to you. During that hour we will watch the lights go out on the continents and see how Planet Earth gets its hour of rest, Earth Hour. The International Space Station itself will not be turning off its lights, a source in the space industry told the RIA Novosti news agency.