Daylight Saving Time Wastes Energy

An anonymous reader writes "With the time approaching when we'll be changing our clocks again, the Wall Street Journal is running a timely article on a study done by a UC-Santa Barbara economics professor and a Ph.D. student. The study unambiguously concludes that Daylight Saving Time not only doesn't save any energy, it actually wastes energy and costs more. The study used energy company records from Indiana before and after that state mandated DST for all of its counties, and calculated that the switch cost Indiana citizens $8.6M per year. 'I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,' the professor said."

Who Benefits?

The story I've heard is that Daylight Saving Time legislation is driven by the companies that make charcoal barbecue briquettes. They don't care if your home uses more heat in the morning. They just want you to have a nice, long, bright evening in which you will have the desire to use their products.

Bruce

Re:Who Benefits?

Programmers that have to adapt their code to take in account daylight savings time. They get more work out of the deal. Kind of the Y2K effect. I live in the one state with the sense to ignore it, Arizona. Perception is everything and if there's a perceived benefit it won't change. The real problem is you aren't changing the day length all you are doing is moving the extra daylight from the morning to evening. When I lived in a state with daylight savings I always found it annoying because one day I'm getting up after the sun is up then suddenly the next day I'm getting up and it's still dark. All it does is throw off body clocks and cost productivity until people adapt then in six months they go through the same mess. It's interesting that it actually costs power but there's little doubt it costs money and productivity so it's a pointless exercise.

Re:Who Benefits? (OT rant)

Don't forget the sysadmins that have to implement the new code that tries to deal with DST!

Exchange and SharePoint both seem to have huge issues with daylight savings. I think Microsoft must have gone out of their way to ensure they have as many different places to store timezone information as they could find. You need an update for Windows to get the new definitions; that's cool. Then you need an update for Exchange. Then there's another update for MAPI. I think there were a few more than this as well, but (fortunately) I'm not our Exchange admin. I can't believe how much of a mess it all was, though.

Then there's the brand spankin' new SharePoint 2007, which sits around scratching its balls for an hour during DST because the part that schedules jobs to run and the part that starts them running at the scheduled clearly have different ideas about timezones. What a joke. Why does any of this even HAVE its own timezone database, and not just use the system one? It boggles the mind. Even now after their hotfixes to resolve this issue, the jobs still say they're scheduled to run at some point in the future. But hey, under the hood it works properly, so I can deal with the UI telling lies.

Wandering even further off-topic, the human-readable part of meeting requests sent by Outlook uses the wrong timezone. Here's one I just sent myself to schedule a meeting at 6.30pm:

When: Tuesday, 4 March 2008 6:30 PM-7:00 PM (GMT+08:00) Perth.

Very nice, really - it tells you the exact offset from GMT so there's no question about when exactly this meeting is. Unfortunately, +0800 is our usual non-DST timezone. During DST (which we're in now until the end of March) it's +0900. Apparently the GMT+08:00 is just part of the timezone name, but it's confusing as hell to anyone who receives these messages. This is particularly problematic if you're scheduling conference calls and the like with people in other states (or countries) who can't reasonably be expected to know about WA's DST trial.

I would've thought a problem like that would have been noticed and fixed a long time ago, given that most of the USA do have DST.

Re:Who Benefits?

DST seems like a pain. However, after I moved to Japan, I realized how nice it actually is. The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing. Makes sleeping in virtually impossible.

So, you can change the clocks, or change your schedule. Having DST ensures that everyone changes together.

Re:Who Benefits?

Uh, there are such things as curtains and shutters.

The Japanese didn't see the benefit of DST. The US imposed it during the Occupation. The first thing the Japanese government did when it regained control was get rid of it.

Re:Who Benefits?

Work 8 to 4?

That's right. And the most surefire way to convince your boss to let you work 9-5 in the winter and 8-4 in the summer is to institute DST.

Here is a solution for you

If you go to one of the local 100-yen stores, you can find this nice little blindfold thingee. With one of those you can sleep in until 3 PM if you want to. I have two -- one is the standard elastic-headband contraption and the other is just a black anime-esque cat which sits on your face all night. More for the novelty value than anything.

Now, while the USD has been falling against the yen recently, I'm going to wager that 100 yen is still less than $8.6 million.

Re:Who Benefits?

I actually think that the whole Japanese time zone is wrong. The sun is up for 4 hours before anyone leaves the house, and you're still going home in the dark. It's a total waste of daylight, but it isn't a DST problem so much as it is one of the timezone being totally screwed up.

Re:Who Benefits?

No confusion. In the summers in Japan, the sunrise times are between 4:30am and 5am. DST would push that back to a more reasonable 5:30~6am.

Also, with DST, you get another hour of daylight tacked on to the end of a summer day. In Japan, the summer sunset is around 7pm. It'd be nice to have sun until 8pm.

A third point to consider is that these are the hours that the sun breaks the horizon. It starts getting light as early as 3:30am and is usually completely dark by 8pm.

In short, DST is nice if you like to do things on summer afternoons.

Re:Who Benefits?

The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing.

WTF? Are you confusing Daylight Savings Time with Time Zones maybe?

No. It's called living in high latitudes.

In London, even with daylight saving, the sun rises at 04:45 for all of June.

Even now, it's light when I get up in the morning at 06:30 but it's dark before I leave work in the evening.

It's much harder to take advantage of daylight hours in the morning when you are working. I cycle - but I can't go out for half an hour in the morning because I need to be in the shower by 06:35 if I'm going to catch my train to work in the morning, which means I'll be getting at this time of year just around sunrise. Give me that hour in the evening instead and I can have a shower, get cleaned up, whatever, once the sun has gone down.

I'd like summer time in the winter and double summer time in the summer (or even triple summer time). On the longest day It's sunrise at 04:43 - and almost nobody is up and around at that time. But it's sunset at 21:22 and there are lots of people out and about at that time. And that's with summer time giving us an extra hour in the evening.

Several safety groups in the UK claim (I haven't seen the figures) that there's a spike in road traffic accidents to children when the clocks go back. Roughly, it goes from sunset at 17:45 to sunset at 16:45 across the UK.

Aberdeen, at the other end of the UK, gets sun from 04:12 to 22:08 on the longest day. On the shortest day it's 08:46 to 15:27.

Tim.

No, Really!

Look at how Kingsford crows about the earlier institution of DST in this press release [thecloroxcompany.com]. I bet they do serious lobbying on this issue.

Re:You're close, actually

The other end was extended to include Halloween for safety reasons; kids can go Trick-Or-Treating in daylight.

Why not do it like AZ?

Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all. You want more daylight? Get up earlier. Need more time to work? Work summer hours.

It's MUCH easier than having to change your clocks all the time. And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

"Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all."

Yeah, let's do away with all of this time zone crap too. I think the folks on the other side of the world from me can all go third shift.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

Take vitamins.. lot safer than being in the Sun. Do you have a family? Every minute you are in the Sun is another chance that you will get skin cancer and DIE.. then who will take care of your kids? Don't you think it is a bit selfish of you to be endangering your life like that? :)

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

Yeah, and oxygen is what leads to old age and ultimately 'so called' natural death. So breath less. Breath slower. You only have so many. Make them last. ;)

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

Don't get me started on how bad exercise is for you.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

Glass is a win, too. Lasts forever in a landfill, but makes great house insulation if you recycle it. Given that sand mining in California is now from underwater, that's got to be a win. Paper and used cartons get bought, so I'd be surprised if they weren't a win too. Out here in Berkeley there's a biowaste can for yard and food waste, and they compost it en masse, with proper temperature and agitation, not like most backyard compost. The city doesn't buy fertilizer, and they get enough extra to hand out sacks of beautiful carbon and nitrogen rich black soil to the residents. Plants shoot up on that stuff. There is a commercial styrofoam recycling plant in Oakland.

So, what's left is plastic.

Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

I mean, after all, you're not going to get hypothermia. Most of you will be miserable of course, and the cost of that is rather difficult to calculate. I don't know about the rest of you out there in Slash-land, but my co-workers and I have been looking forward to coming home after work and having an extra hour of daylight. It's priceless. So. Put that in your penny-pinching pipe and smoke it.

Or the sample is not enough?

From TFA:
"One study of the situation in Indiana cannot accurately asses the impact of [daylight-saving time] changes across the nation, especially when it does not include more northern, colder regions," the congressman (Mr. Markey) notes.

Alternate interpretation

The conclusions seem reasonable, but I'm disturbed that the researchers didn't consider the potential impact of overall hotter summers. Did neighboring states have relatively flat energy usage over the same period?

Give me more light in the evening

I think it should be permanently 'sprung forward' so we get more light in the evening. Otherwise useless to us non-morning people. Bah! (image of Catbert holding rolled up newspaper)

Letter to my congressional reps

I wrote this to my congressional representatives last fall:

Dear Sir:

Daylight savings time hits hard this time of year.

It was cold and dark when I got up this morning, so the
first thing I did was was turn up the heat and turn on the
lights. That's going to jack up my energy bill for the
month.

Then I drove my son to school. He missed his bus all five
days this week. That's going to jack up my fuel bill for the
month.

Then I dragged myself through another day at work. I don't
function well when I have to get up before dawn.

The people in my family are all diurnal (dI-UR-nal). It
means we sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light. The
problem is that in northern latitudes (like Massachusetts)
the sun rises later in the winter than in the summer.

To compensate for this, we have a scheme called Daylight
Savings Time. Daylight savings shifts our school and work
schedules forward in the summer and back in the winter, to
keep them roughly in sync with the sun. It used to work
pretty well, but congress broke it a couple of years ago:
now it goes too long in the fall and starts too early in the
spring.

Most of the damage that congress does affects me at some
remove, but this--this comes right out of my hide. When I'm
stumbling around in the dark for three weeks next spring,
I'll be thinking of you.

Sincerely, ...

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

Maybe we should just set the clocks so the sun comes up at noon. That way you'll get to see a beautiful sunrise over lunch, it will be nice and bright outside when you get home, and the sun will set sometime after you go to sleep.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

So just because you can't get your lazy ass out of bed in the morning means you should get more sunlight in the evening... right. What about those who enjoy a quiet morning stroll in the park before they go to work? What about all of us who take weeks, two times a year, to get their sleeping under control because their internal clock gets all messed up? Do I need to walk around like a zombie for days afterwards (again, twice a year!) just because YOU think nature has to adapt to your schedule?