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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."
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
DST would be worth it even if it wasted energy. Morning hours of daylight are useless to me considering that I am either at work or on the way to work. I can actually use after-work hours of daylight to do something enjoyable. That's the original rationale for DST and it still applies. DST should be extended year-round.
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?
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... both of which would use more energy I would have thought.
Show me the figures with those items adjusted for and there may be something worth a story.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
The one I want to know is how much energy it takes all of the people across the country to separate out and otherwise deal with recycling. Sure, it's just a few seconds here and there, but added up, that's probably a significant number of Joules of energy being used.
And then to convert that amount of energy into the number of barrels of oil it represents. I don't think most people have ever considered the equation of how much oil we are spending to enable us to use less oil. (only talking plastic, of course - aluminum is a pretty clear case of a win for recycling)
There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate.
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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)
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.
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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.
I agree. Not only that, but also get rid of AM/PM and just go to a 24 Hour clock. In all seriousness, it would get rid of ambiguity when referring to time in any medium. It would take some adjusting for people to get the hang of the sun rising at 13:30 where they live, or working from 18:00 to to 2:00. But when you want to call your relatives that live on the other side of the country (assuming your country spans multiple current time zones) it will be easy to say, "Hey, I'll call you tomorrow at 11:00," and there will be no question of "your time or my time?"
No DST.
No Timezones.
No AM/PM.
*slight crashing sound*
What makes "changing the concept of time so that people can get up an hour earlier but still call of 6am" more reasonable than "getting up an hour earlier at 5am"?
What's to stop you starting work at 8am instead of doing exactly the same thing and calling it 9am instead? You'd finish at 4pm instead of pretending it's 5pm, and still get your evening.
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So people are really so stuck in their ways that work has to start when the clock says 9?
If you're going to change the clocks, change them drastically, make 9 occur in the middle of the night, see if people really are stubborn enough to go to work at such hours.
I also think timezones should be abolished, they only serve to confuse, especially with the global communication we have now. Time should be something that always remains constant, so things can be kept in sync. Having multiple timezones confuses that, using dst to manipulate those timezones even further just makes the problem even worse.
Why is it that the idea of things occurring at specific numbers on the clock is more important than what those numbers actually mean?
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What makes it more reasonable?
The fact that everyone in the same geographical area does it together I guess.
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Won't that just replace the problem with "what time do you guys start work over there?" If I call a colleague in Australia or India now, and they till me it's "11am here" I at least know what that means in relation to their normal daily routine.
If DST was abolished, and all companies were encouraged and allowed to alter their hours accordingly, they would. States that didn't have DST still survived, happier by many arguments.
In manufacturing, hours are already often changed due to heating and energy issues. Office workers hours could be changed for similar reasons, and the general customer service industry will follow suit.
DST is the tool of the Devil.
We're called Hoosiers you insensitive clod!
You forget how timezones were created here. Before the concept of a time zone, current time was regulated by determining the local mean solar time for you particular location... meaning your exact longitude. Defining what "now" was could be different even on opposite sides of a college campus, much less between different cities. At least with the concept of a time zone, all the arithmetic you have to perform is to add or subtract a few hours, unless you are dealing with truly global enterprises or projects.
On a historical note, the concept of a time zone was introduced by the railroad companies, who found that it was incredibly difficult for them to make train schedules where each individual town on the route would have its own definition of time. Imagine the locomotive engineer who had to have something like a complex GPS receiver that would give the local "time" as they moved across Kansas heading for the Rocky Mountains built out of 19th Century technology. It just didn't work, so instead the idea of a time zone that would only have to be occasionally adjusted for genuinely long distance travel was created.
This also had the advantage that it was at most about a 1/2 hour off from the "local time" used in the previous definition of "now". In other words, it wasn't too difficult to move people off of the previous "standard" onto the newer "standard" of time zones. With your proposal of elimination of time zones (which is pretty much the case anyway in terms of synchronizing computers and other scientific experiments needing that level of organization), getting ordinary people to adjust to a global clock is going to cause many other problems. Such as why should Paris/London be selected as the "ideal" time zone, as opposed to Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, or New York/Washington DC? GMT/UTC is an adopted standard only because that is what mariners for the UK Royal Navy used during a period of global colonial dominance, not that the French didn't mind using the same standard either for the most part as Paris and London are nearly the same longitude, at least for time considerations.
One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office". Having a bill collector call you at 6 A.M. is not only annoying... it can even be illegal, especially if they ignore the concept of a timezone when they call you. And yes, that has happened to me.