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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."
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
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"?
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.
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?
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
... 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.
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)
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.
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,
The other end was extended to include Halloween for safety reasons; kids can go Trick-Or-Treating in daylight.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.
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?
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.
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.