Slashdot Mirror
Daylight Savings Time Increases Energy Use In Indiana
enbody writes "The Freakonomics Blog at NYTimes.com reports on a study of Indiana energy use for daylight savings time showing an increase in energy use of 1%. 'The dataset consists of more than 7 million observations on monthly billing data for the vast majority of households in southern Indiana for three years. Our main finding is that — contrary to the policy's intent — D.S.T. increases residential electricity demand.'" Maybe that's just from millions of coffee makers being pressed into extra duty.
I've gotta say, I'm in England and as soon as the clocks change, my power consumption goes way up. I don't even use heaters where I live so I've never worked out where it's coming from....
I can say, living in Eastern Illinois (Chicago), that when Daylight savings rolls around, we do engage our coffee maker to make the transition a little easier. If enough households do this, I wouldn't be surprised if the "coffeemaker" effect is significant enough to cause serious change in energy usage. For example, our coffee maker draws 1200 watts(!) while brewing.
Of course it is very difficult to make an apples to apples comparison since energy demands are changing year to year anyway. Observed changes cannot be only attributed to the DST changes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I still have a number of computers that are running older operating systems for which there is no patch. The best thing to do about this ridiculous time change stuff is just to put it back the way it was.
Of COURSE daylight savings stuff changes how much electricity you use.
Afterall, if they give us an extra hour of daytime then your appliances are running for a full 25 hours a day.
you have to run all your appliances for that extra hour every single day all winter.
liqbase
Daylight Saving Time. Saving, singular, not Savings, plural.
As you were.
In order to really determine the effect though, they need to look at all power usage not just households. What about municipalities (street lights, water pumps, etc.), businesses, office space, Government offices, etc.). If you don't calculate it all - and you come out with a 1% difference - you may just have found nothing of any relevance since the intent is to save power overall.
I live in indiana and i can see why. Since it starts getting dark here about 5:30-6 and is fully dark by 7-7:30.
When we fall back from DST to standard time, I notice a lot of people seem more visibly depressed, or "blah." I think there is something about the day ending at 4:30 pm that feels unnatural. Not only are the days getting shorter in the Fall, but then people have to deal with the sun setting an hour earlier.
This indicates to me that people actually enjoy DST. If anything, I would support a year-round DST.
I don't care if it uses more energy, I like it when it gets dark later. I like getting out of work while it's still light outside.
The article doesn't describe how the produced the estimate of 1%. If they just looked at the year-over-year change, the number could be meaningless as that might be within the normal variation/trend of energy consumption.
The method economists use in this situation is to look at the group that your changing (Indiana) and compare the change in energy consumption to a nearby control group (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky). You can then look at the RELATIVE changes to get a valid answer.
***
Ok, I just followed the link to the actual paper, and it looks like they used several Indiana counties that were on DST prior to the policy change as their control. So, yeah, their results look pretty valid. In conclusion: Down with DST!
Where I live, switching to DST means I'm getting up earlier, before sunrise and running lights I otherwise wouldn't need. Although it makes sundown later, it doesn't seem to save me much energy. I may run fewer lights, but I still have to run A/C, which is the major hit on my electric bill in the summer.
Plus, I find the sudden shift back in the fall to be rather depressing. One Friday I'm coming home after work in the daylight and the following Monday I'm driving home in the dark. The gradual shift of the seasons would be less jarring for me at least.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
I thought the change of DST rule was to create IT jobs in adopting the old system, and troubleshooting the mess introduced by the old rules, etc....No?
Anyway, every time operation should be done in UTC in the core especially when it has to deal with cross timezone operations and globalization.
On the other hand, It's stupid to see Windows can only handle 2 active rules before Vista at any given time, on the other hand *nix and Vista can have define unlimited rules given a period of the time. I couldn't imagine how one would devise a local time using the DST rule of time in Windows XP, probably revert to reinvent-the-wheel?...luckily I don't have to deal with anything like that yet.
DST has been studied many times over the years and the informed consensus is that it just doesn't work. Here's a good link about it: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/03/11/think-daylight-saving-time-saves-energy-think-again-or-not/
The long and the short of the matter is this. It's good for business - it gets people out of the house and into the stores after work. So business lobbies government for the required legislation and pushes the energy saving myth to snow the public into going along with it (despite it being an inconvenience in the minds of many).
Why didn't they test this in a few states before doing it nation-wide? They fuck with our clocks, operating systems, and minds with no rational plan.
Table-ized A.I.
I think the key phrase is "D.S.T. increases residential electricity demand."
The company or what/whoever you work for will see a positive effect, at the expense of the consumer. That is exactly what I've always believed DST was meant to do (by those who invented it), in the first place.
Second, what is the one percent based on? Previous months use? Historical and adjusted values for same month use?
Third, do the increases adjust for changes in fall activities. For instance, were the kids all going to school at the same time? Does the start of school effect the figures?Do the number of holidays effect the figures?
All I really know at this point is that some people stuck some number in spreadsheet and saw a spike. Next thing you will telling me is that the only reason the days start getting longer is that, fortunately, some traditionalist still hold a ceremony on the 21st to make it do so, rather than the much too late 25th.
I really don't know if DST helps, or if this paper is valid. However, it appears that the only variable this paper controls for is weather, and rather For instance, their data shows an increase over the month of September, exactly when parents are getting up earlier to get the kids ready for school, while July through september, months when parents do not get get kids ready for school, is not increased, even though children may be home during the day using electricity. I do see how any question is answered. Some nice data analysis, so nice inferences, but who knows if anything else.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Every year, the energy utilities report that they observed no difference in energy use when daylight savings time is changed. It really is time to stop this annoyance.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The whole idea of having to develop an entire infrastructure and spend so much effort (e.g. writing software, following changes in policies, synchronizing between different DST zones, even manually correcting clocks) just to supposedly save a little energy thanks to "using more sunlight" is beyond idiotic. I won't even touch the fact that to me it is kind of obvious that the DST could never work as intended. But even if we were certain it would work, the CHANGE twice a year add such an overhead that would wipe out any potential gain.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Anybody else out there think it's a little odd to be using the term "Standard Time" for a period that covers only 4 months of the year now?
I live in Indiana in a county that had no daylight savings. I would get up and the sun would be just rising. I would shower and drive to work in the morning sun. I would work all day and come home and the sun would still be up. I would do my house work and eat dinner and the sun would be setting. During the winter I would get home just a hour or so before dusk and nothing else would much change.
Now I get up and it is dark. I turn on lights, take a shower and because it is dark out I just feel more tired. This means I actually take longer to take my shower and get ready to go to work. On top of this I find myself drinking coffee to stay awake. I get home and it is still daylight, but it still feels like it gets dark just as quickly.
Worse then that is the period leading up to the time change. It was dark when I woke up and dark when I got home. This was the previous month before we switched times again. Daylight savings is a stupid premise imho.
How long must we continue this DST insanity? It doesn't accomplish anything beneficial. Nothing, nada, zip. If you like getting out of work in the light, then lobby to switch your state to a different time zone year round, but please please not DST.
On the other hand DST costs us plenty in confusion and lost work hours, and in maintaining software that deals with 24x7 matters. All such software must deal with one 23 hour day an one 25 hour day each year. Especially when said software integrates with external software and people it is next to impossible to assure error free transition to or from DST. Someone in the chain always drops the ball. One of these days, we're going to have an accidental missile launch or a nuclear meltdown or some really bad accident directly linked to DST.
One of the real lessons we should have learned from Y2K was that dealing with our insanely complex conventions for time and date are vastly expensive and the cause of chronic errors. New errors are still being created every day because the author deals incorrectly with time. DST just heaps on even more crap and returns no benefit.
Down with DST!
1) Any good developer knows you don't redefine time. If a business wants to start work early, just say start at 7AM.
2) What about all the wasted time spent dealing with the change?
We need the extra hour of daylight for growing our Fall crops, so leave DST alone.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
What do you mean by you like? Didn't you hear? We're all supposed to conserve energy for The Earth. It's not about what anyone likes, it's about sacrificing our comfort, our prosperity, and our way of life to benefit The Earth. The Earth demands sacrifice!
Now, start listening to your Leaders. They know what choices you should make. They say you should conserve energy. For The Earth. Any choice that uses more energy is Bad. Any choice that uses less is Good. There are no exceptions for productivity and no consideration for humanity. Just use less. Obey.
(The Leaders are exempt and may use all the energy they wish.)
The Bush administration, with
its fine misunderestimated mathematical minds,
who also calculated that if Osama Bin Laden
was hiding on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border,
we should go defeat him in Baghdad.
Oh and the same minds who calculated that
even though co2 lets in visible-light and ultraviolet
energy from the Sun and reflects and traps in infra-red
energy that radiates back off the Earth, it won't cause
global warming, because that would reduce oil
sale revenues.
It's honestly quite a shocker that this cunningly
devised plan didn't work.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Well, it is nice that in the afternoon I can take my kids to the park, work in the garden, or commute with some day light... All in all, I can actually live my life a lot more because there is daylight when the day is over, and I can enjoy 7 days a week, not 2... But, if we need to use 1% more energy, well let's panic. The energy savings of DST has obviously been silly since light became a small portion of energy usage, but if it's only 1% more, I'd say that's pretty cheap.
I think that I can 50% - more recreational time each week during DST, so if I can do that for 1% more energy, terrific. OTOH, I spent less time watching TV on on the computer because there is more useful daylight, another bonus. Daylight before I get up in the morning doesn't do me any good, but having daylight for my commute in and for my evenings with my family are precious.
I'm always saddened when DST comes to an end. Why the whiners on Slashdot complain about DST, I'll never understand. The transition week is annoying, and my two year old has been struggling with his rhythm being off, but as a trade off for all those summer afternoons in the park with him, it's a bargain.
I don't care what anyone says, what any statistics say, I wish we'd do away with standard time all together.
It gets dark WAY too damn early, and it gets light in the morning WAY too damn early.
I'd rather it be on "Daylight Savings Time" year round. Despense with the setting of the clocks twice a year, and all the headaches that result from it. Just let us go to Daylight Savings Time next year, and then STAY THERE. Forever.
I can't imagine any valid reasonable reason not to.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
an evidence that my country, Japan, shouldn't introduce DST. Japan is again considering to introduce DST even though we already concluded it won't work in Japan for cultural/geometrical reasons decades ago. Pro claims that it's good for environment, but I haven't seen a single scientific evidence to support it. Con, like me, complains that DST will definitely confuse people and IT systems!
I, for one, shit every time I want. It helps to get rid of shitty ideas.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
That just can't be.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Probability Theory 101: the bigger the sample population, the more accuracy one can obtain. 1% is all too random for 1,000 people, but for 1,000,000 people, it tells a lot more. Of course, other factors are important too.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
you know, back when farmers where around, then it made sense to change it. Now it just messes up everything. First of all, all of a sudden it gets light an hour early, I wake up with the sun so at what used to be 8, it's now 7 so I have to do something for that extra hour (use electricity to post on /. for example) then I come home at night and where I used to make dinner in the sunlight before plopping down in the couch or doing something, now I need electricity to light up my kitchen for the rest of winter until the sun (and my body) has caught up with the time. Next to that because my body clock is all screwed up for the rest of the month, I have one hour less sleep and one hour more activity whether it be computer, tv or something else, I live at night and I have to use electricity to light my house.
And then when summer comes around, the same thing goes the backward way. All of a sudden it's dark in the morning and I need lights in my home and office for the whole morning (because once it gets light enough, I don't notice them being on).
And there is no excuse for farmers anymore, one of my family members is an 'agricultural engineer'. These days farms are industrialized and literally work 24/7 to work their huge lands with as little (very expensive) machinery as possible (having 3-shifts of work on 1 machine). And the "biological" farmers (the smaller ones that sell their food at premium price to health stores) work at night now too since it's suppositively healthier for their crops and the environment to be cultivated (plowed etc.) at night. Even the 'classic' farmers have huge spotlights on their machines, I don't know any farmer that still has his horses pull a plow.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Do you hate getting out of bed 1 hour earlier at the start of daylight savings. Try this:
1 week before daylight savings starts, set your alarm 10 minutes earlier each day. That is it.
Your body adjusts a lot better to the 10 minute differences than it does to one 1 hour difference.
That is all.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Draughts? No wonder daylight saving has a checkered history!
Or maybe some of that foamy tape stuff in his door/window frames would help fix the problem?
Most excellent. Pedantry is becoming a lost art. You can almost never find a grammar nazi when you need one.
Let's not confuse pedantry with grammar nazism; they are not the same, though they often appear so to the layman.
A pedant is concerned with picayune details of correctness. Such a person has problems with bad science in science fiction movies, for instance.
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that is 'one true grammar.' Such a person is especially confused when we're talking about corrections to the use of the English language, as there IS no central authority for the language, and what some people assume to be hard and fast 'rules' are actually specific styles that vary from region to region, and publication to publication. The 'AP Style Guide' (AP is for Associated Press), and the Chicago Manual of Style are great examples of the latter. Neither of these are more correct than the other, unless you're writing for a publication that mandates that particular style. A grammar nazi will latch onto one of these things and never let go, not realizing that 'rules' like 'no dangling participles' and whatnot, are no more 'rules' in English than whether you put a comma or not before the last item in a list in a sentence. Many of the AP 'rules' are what they are to save space and/or ink in printed publications, and have little to no bearing (at best) in the modern world, or are unnecessary or deleterious with regard to electronic publishing. You can always tell the English majors and print geeks are involved when you see paragraphs with no blank lines between them, and a 'half-inch' indentation starting each paragraph. The Web is not the same as print (nor is it the same as TV). You'll also notice these people tend to put two spaces after a period, etc., and insist on curly apostrophes and quotation marks. They also love the phrase, 'below the fold,' as if that was a specific measurement on the Web. These people believe that all computer screens use 72 'dpi', and don't understand that CRTs, at least, can vary their 'dpi,' simply by changing resolution. I belive I've strayed from my point here - sorry.
I prefer clarity and ease of understanding before any perceived 'rules' of English grammar, which certainly proves, at least in my case, that pedantry and Grammar Nazism are not the same.
Though I really hate it when people put in unnecessary apostrophes. "CD's" for instance. Gack.
both em-dash and hyphen are available on your keyboard btw
What you linked to does not prove what you said. Putting in codes to output the characters you want is not, in my mind, the same as 'available on your keyboard,' and Pedantic-Man isn't especially interested in such nonsense as outputting different types of dashes/hyphens when the 'minus key' on the keyboard will do for the sake of clarity. Pedantic-Man is also pretty lazy. :)
Pedantic-Man says, "Stay out of trouble!"
Good advice. I checked out those en- and em-dash inputs on this Mac Powerbook, and sure enough, I get three different-length dashes. But a hex dump showed me that the en-dash and em-dash are both UTF-8 encoded. So I'll predict that if I enter them here, they won't show up correctly on many readers' screens. Let's try:
- hyphen
- en-dash
-- em-dash
Now is there a way to find out what fraction of readers see all of those as the proper-length dashes on their screens? Hmmm ... Let's try the Preview button and see if it even works on my own screen ... Nope; the first two came back as hyphens, and the em-dash came back as a double hyphen. So the claim that I can input them from my keyboard failed spectacularly in this simple case.
The problem, of course, is that there is no universally-accepted encoding for the en-dash or the em-dash. Only the ASCII hyphen works reliably everywhere. If /. accepted UTF-8-encoded input and didn't damage it, AND if /. correctly labelled the text as charset="UTF-8", AND if everyone's browser correctly displayed UTF-8 text, it would have worked. But it's been more than 15 years since Ken T gave us the UTF-8 encoding, and most of the computer world (especially inside the US and Europe) has quietly ignored it.
(Yes, I know that by "most of the computer world" I meant Microsoft. But in this case, MS probably isn't involved; the damage was done by slashdot's software. MS isn't to blame for all of our communication problems. Both Apple and the linux crowd have made snafus out of their attempts to move to UTF-8 and Unicode, and much of the web runs software that damages UTF-8 text with malice aforethought, as /. did to my above test. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It's all air-conditioning's fault. To get to sleep in the summer under EDT, people need to run the A/C more later in the evening than they would under EST. With a set-back thermostat, A/C runs fewer hours in the day under EST.
Only a white man would believe that cutting a foot off the top of a blanket and sewing on to the bottom would make a longer blanket.
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that is 'one true grammar.'
A grammar nazi is often a very confused person who believes that there is 'one true grammar.'
There, fixed that for you.