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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."
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.
Look at how Kingsford crows about the earlier institution of DST in this press release. I bet they do serious lobbying on this issue.
Bruce Perens.
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.
So, what's left is plastic.
Bruce Perens.
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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
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.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
I wonder if they read a similar paper from a year ago?
RYAN M. KELLOGG and Hendrik Wolff, "Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from an Australian Experiment" (February 14, 2007). Center for the Study of Energy Markets. Paper CSEMWP-163.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucei/csem/CSEMWP-163
Maybe there should be some kind of central place we could all use to search for papers that have some bearing our subject matter?
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.