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

Who Benefits?

[Bruce Perens]

The story I've heard is that Daylight Saving Time legislation is driven by the companies that make charcoal barbecue briquettes. They don't care if your home uses more heat in the morning. They just want you to have a nice, long, bright evening in which you will have the desire to use their products.

Bruce

Re:Who Benefits?

[edwardpickman]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[belmolis]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bert64]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bert64]

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?

Why not do it like AZ?

[Xenographic]

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.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[alshithead]

"Skip DST entirely. No clock changes at all."

Yeah, let's do away with all of this time zone crap too. I think the folks on the other side of the world from me can all go third shift.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[SixArmedJesus]

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.

Or the sample is not enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Give me more light in the evening

[PhantomHarlock]

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)

Re:You're close, actually

[Phroggy]

The other end was extended to include Halloween for safety reasons; kids can go Trick-Or-Treating in daylight.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[Gutboy]

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.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[Kokuyo]

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?

Re:Who Benefits? (OT rant)

[totally bogus dude]

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.