You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was.
In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight Saving Time,” U.S News notes:
Daylight saving time was first used during World War I, as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.
But DST saves as much energy as light, according to most studies, as I noted last year. An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.”
In fact, a recent study, in fact, found DST “may actually waste energy“:
Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.
Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.
Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.
“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.
A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.
Probably the best recent case for DST is from a 2008 Department of Energy report for Congress, which found DST saved a whopping .02% of the country’s total use in 2007. But Wikipedia lists a bunch of other studies on DST, most of which (but not all) come to a similar conclusion as the Australia study.
U.S. News concludes, “When clocks spring forward, people lose sleep, have more heart attacks, and might not even save energy.”
Enjoy!
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I’m against DST. However, it made Congress feel good about themselves in 2007 when they extended DST about month by moving DST up to the 2nd Sunday in March and back to the last Sunday in October. They thought this would save energy. Its like Congress real did something about energy policy.
I think the U.S. should do what India does. They split the difference between DST and standard time. They are off by 1/2 hour from every one else. In the fall, I think we need to make one more time change. Just fall back 1/2 hour and stop the DST silliness.
I think DST is a great idea…
Who needs all that daylight early in the morning?
It probably doesn’t do anything for energy, but those long summer afternoons are a wonderful thing here in Canada.
Non-monatomically increasing time is idiotic and wastes a ton of money in IT trying to make sure that servers and services deal with the time jumping around due to congressional mandate. The whole 2007 DST change was a mini-Y2K effort in getting server timezones updated and virtual machines updated and bouncing everything to make sure that changes took effect. Huge firedrill that distracted IT from doing other more productive things for a month or two.
Either switch it all to DST or switch it all to standard time and make all these stupid little headaches go away.
I agree with Brewster. If it doesn’t save energy that is OK with me. Life is also important. For those that must work 8 hour days, DST gives us more time for life, recreation, and family.
I saved my hour so I can have it back in the fall.
The study may show that for a set of agricultural communities that DST costs more than it saves in energy, but does this apply to cities where people don’t have to get up, like farmers, “to work an extra hour in the morning dark”, and presumably switch on all the lights in the house. The patterns of daily life for the vast majority of people are just too different from those used in the examples given. Ergo, I am still skeptical.
Bob
Of course you can save dayligth! Saving is putting something away for later; saving an hour of daylight in the morning gives you an hour extra daylight in the afternoon.
I know this blog is focused on environmental issues but…I have to say that most everyone I know HATES how dark it is in the winter. The day we set the clocks back is the most depressing heinous day of the year. Having it be pitch black at 4:30 is the pits.
Losing that extra hour of afternoon light in the winter takes a major toll in national mental health. Depressed people are too…depressed!…to give a hoot about the environment.
Save the Daylight! Leave those clocks alone.
Let’s change DST one more time. Make it all year around to obtain the maximum possible benefit. This would also have the advantage of making it unneccessary to change the clocks twice per year!