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."

Comments

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[locofungus]

A better solution, and one which businesses seem to be strangely adverse to, is starting work earlier, and knocking off earlier. Same benefits, with none of the pointless government intervention crap that DST requires, and no need to move the clocks around.

So we start with the stock market. On 30th March the London stock exchanges all open at 7am instead of 8am and close at 4:30pm instead of 5:30pm. So now all those people who work in the City need to travel to work an hour earlier. So all the trains have to be re timetabled. The gyms etc that people use before work now all have to open an hour earlier. The starbucks etc now have to open earlier to support those city workers on the way to work. The pub workers have to start their evening shift an hour earlier.

You really think it would be easier to change the time we do things rather than change the clocks?

And I've always wondered why the people who think the moving the clocks is such a problem and the people who like to have light in the evening occasionally when they get home are so unreasonable by not working an hour earlier don't practice what they preach and continue to work exactly the same daylight hours after the clock change. It really isn't difficult to get used to automatically translating times when you are doing it all the time. I do a lot of work with the US - week before last a US college arranged a meeting for 11am. I had just assumed he meant 4pm my time although he was actually in the UK and really meant 11am GMT.

Tim.

Tim.