Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Daylight Saving Time Wastes Energy

Posted by kdawson on from the back-to-nature's-clock dept.

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."

2 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. Why not do it like AZ? by Xenographic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Who Benefits? (OT rant) by totally+bogus+dude · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.