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."

Who Benefits?

[Bruce Perens (3872)]

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 (965122)]

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?

[Bruce Perens (3872)]

Programmers that have to adapt their code to take in account daylight savings time.

That's Arthur David Olsen for all Unix, Linux, BSD, Macintosh, and then the guy from Microsoft. It's gotta be only one guy at Microsoft, the way of handling this in Vista is so dumb.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bruce Perens (3872)]

Here's the Zoneinfo article in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Impressive.

Re:Who Benefits? (OT rant)

[totally bogus dude (1040246)]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bios_Hakr (68586)]

DST seems like a pain. However, after I moved to Japan, I realized how nice it actually is. The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing. Makes sleeping in virtually impossible.

So, you can change the clocks, or change your schedule. Having DST ensures that everyone changes together.

Re:Who Benefits?

[belmolis (702863)]

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?

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

Work 8 to 4?

That's right. And the most surefire way to convince your boss to let you work 9-5 in the winter and 8-4 in the summer is to institute DST.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bert64 (520050)]

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?

Re:Who Benefits?

[Teancum (67324)]

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.

You forget how timezones were created here. Before the concept of a time zone, current time was regulated by determining the local mean solar time for you particular location... meaning your exact longitude. Defining what "now" was could be different even on opposite sides of a college campus, much less between different cities. At least with the concept of a time zone, all the arithmetic you have to perform is to add or subtract a few hours, unless you are dealing with truly global enterprises or projects.

On a historical note, the concept of a time zone was introduced by the railroad companies, who found that it was incredibly difficult for them to make train schedules where each individual town on the route would have its own definition of time. Imagine the locomotive engineer who had to have something like a complex GPS receiver that would give the local "time" as they moved across Kansas heading for the Rocky Mountains built out of 19th Century technology. It just didn't work, so instead the idea of a time zone that would only have to be occasionally adjusted for genuinely long distance travel was created.

This also had the advantage that it was at most about a 1/2 hour off from the "local time" used in the previous definition of "now". In other words, it wasn't too difficult to move people off of the previous "standard" onto the newer "standard" of time zones. With your proposal of elimination of time zones (which is pretty much the case anyway in terms of synchronizing computers and other scientific experiments needing that level of organization), getting ordinary people to adjust to a global clock is going to cause many other problems. Such as why should Paris/London be selected as the "ideal" time zone, as opposed to Moscow, New Delhi, Beijing, or New York/Washington DC? GMT/UTC is an adopted standard only because that is what mariners for the UK Royal Navy used during a period of global colonial dominance, not that the French didn't mind using the same standard either for the most part as Paris and London are nearly the same longitude, at least for time considerations.

One other thing to consider (and I've had to be blunt with people from different time zones to point this out)... 8 A.M. "local time" is when most people get up, and about 10 P.M. is when most people head for the bed. If you are aware of this when dealing with people in other time zones, you can be much more polite and note when they may be "in the office". Having a bill collector call you at 6 A.M. is not only annoying... it can even be illegal, especially if they ignore the concept of a timezone when they call you. And yes, that has happened to me.

Re:Who Benefits?

[BigDogCH (760290)]

If DST was abolished, and all companies were encouraged and allowed to alter their hours accordingly, they would. States that didn't have DST still survived, happier by many arguments.

In manufacturing, hours are already often changed due to heating and energy issues. Office workers hours could be changed for similar reasons, and the general customer service industry will follow suit.

DST is the tool of the Devil.

Here is a solution for you

[patio11 (857072)]

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.

Re:Who Benefits?

[SnowZero (92219)]

It's not just DST; Much of the population of Japan is at the extreme east of the longitudinal time zone. Many areas of the US lag the true zones, and you just get too accustomed to what "early" is. The solution is simple; get up earlier. That's what I did when I was working in Tokyo. Unless you work at one of the more insane places, if you get to work early enough then you can leave right at 5 without anyone complaining. If that's not possible, try to make the morning your free time. Mind you this is coming from someone who is no morning person at all; The simple truth is that you have to adapt to the local circumstances. Besides, if you live in a city there's likely a 4:30am train that will wake you up anyway even if it is dark (damn Gotanda line).

DST is not a panacea, and is more trouble than it is worth IMO, especially when politicians start changing it for no good reason. I think we should just stick to the "early" schedule, and live with the idea that you need to get up when it is still dark in the winter. After all, you have to come home in the dark during the winter anyway, so there isn't much of a difference. The "schoolchildren excuse" doesn't really apply anymore either since few kids walk to school nowadays, and if it is really that big of a problem the school could use a later schedule for young children or alter it for part of the year.

Re:Who Benefits?

[kklein (900361)]

I actually think that the whole Japanese time zone is wrong. The sun is up for 4 hours before anyone leaves the house, and you're still going home in the dark. It's a total waste of daylight, but it isn't a DST problem so much as it is one of the timezone being totally screwed up.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bios_Hakr (68586)]

No confusion. In the summers in Japan, the sunrise times are between 4:30am and 5am. DST would push that back to a more reasonable 5:30~6am.

Also, with DST, you get another hour of daylight tacked on to the end of a summer day. In Japan, the summer sunset is around 7pm. It'd be nice to have sun until 8pm.

A third point to consider is that these are the hours that the sun breaks the horizon. It starts getting light as early as 3:30am and is usually completely dark by 8pm.

In short, DST is nice if you like to do things on summer afternoons.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Bert64 (520050)]

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?

[mattcasters (67972)]

What makes it more reasonable?

The fact that everyone in the same geographical area does it together I guess.

Re:Who Benefits?

[bcattwoo (737354)]

"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."

My boss. Well, actually I could probably do that. But then my daughter's daycare has to agree to open an hour earlier, which means her teacher has to agree to go to work an hour earlier, my co-workers have to agree that all meetings will end an hour earlier in the afternoon, etc, etc.

Not a downside

[Woldry (928749)]

What's wrong with spending an hour on your lonesome? Being the antisocial curmudgeon that I am, I'd look forward to it.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Belial6 (794905)]

That argument requires you to believe that it is ok for you to create a huge hassle for the entire country so that you can passive aggressively force all of your peers to hang out with you.

Re:Who Benefits?

[Zenaku (821866)]

Well, Star Trek is fiction, and doesn't take into account relativity. The very concept of "On another planet this same moment in time" is a contradiction, because the passage of time depends on your frame of reference.

I am not a physicist and don't follow the math, but one of the things that general relativity says is that just because some event A happens before some event B when observed from our frame of reference, doesn't mean those same events happen in that order when observed from another frame of reference. If you are on Earth and I'm on Chiron Beta Prime, and we are looking at two stars going super-nova, and in your frame of reference Star A goes before Star B, I may observe Star B to go nova before A.

It's not just a speed of light thing either, there is simply no absolute frame of reference for time, just as there is no absolute "center" of the universe. The lack of an absolute frame of reference makes it impossible to define a consistent "universal clock."

Re:Who Benefits?

[LordVader717 (888547)]

http://www.sunrisesunset.com/custom_srss_calendar.asp [sunrisesunset.com]

Hokkaido in June for example, reveals times all before 4am.

Re:Who Benefits?

[locofungus (179280)]

The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing.

WTF? Are you confusing Daylight Savings Time with Time Zones maybe?

No. It's called living in high latitudes.

In London, even with daylight saving, the sun rises at 04:45 for all of June.

Even now, it's light when I get up in the morning at 06:30 but it's dark before I leave work in the evening.

It's much harder to take advantage of daylight hours in the morning when you are working. I cycle - but I can't go out for half an hour in the morning because I need to be in the shower by 06:35 if I'm going to catch my train to work in the morning, which means I'll be getting at this time of year just around sunrise. Give me that hour in the evening instead and I can have a shower, get cleaned up, whatever, once the sun has gone down.

I'd like summer time in the winter and double summer time in the summer (or even triple summer time). On the longest day It's sunrise at 04:43 - and almost nobody is up and around at that time. But it's sunset at 21:22 and there are lots of people out and about at that time. And that's with summer time giving us an extra hour in the evening.

Several safety groups in the UK claim (I haven't seen the figures) that there's a spike in road traffic accidents to children when the clocks go back. Roughly, it goes from sunset at 17:45 to sunset at 16:45 across the UK.

Aberdeen, at the other end of the UK, gets sun from 04:12 to 22:08 on the longest day. On the shortest day it's 08:46 to 15:27.

Tim.

No, Really!

[Bruce Perens (3872)]

Look at how Kingsford crows about the earlier institution of DST in this press release [thecloroxcompany.com]. I bet they do serious lobbying on this issue.

Re:You're close, actually

[Phroggy (441)]

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

Why not do it like AZ?

[Xenographic (557057)]

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?

[Baricom (763970)]

And it seems that it's much less wasteful, too.

Very true. In fact, I wonder what the actual U.S. labor cost of changing clocks for DST would come out to. Even if you say it takes 10 seconds to reset each clock, that adds up over millions of people.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Endymion (12816)]

The one I want to know is how much energy it takes all of the people across the country to separate out and otherwise deal with recycling. Sure, it's just a few seconds here and there, but added up, that's probably a significant number of Joules of energy being used.

And then to convert that amount of energy into the number of barrels of oil it represents. I don't think most people have ever considered the equation of how much oil we are spending to enable us to use less oil. (only talking plastic, of course - aluminum is a pretty clear case of a win for recycling)

There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Bios_Hakr (68586)]

Bullshit! did a show on recycling. More or less, the only recycling that matters is aluminum. All other recycling *only* works if subsides are in-place.

Most plastics can't be recycled. Type 1, 2, and 3 are *recyclable* but type 1 is the only one commonly recycled.

Most paper will degrade anyway. A lot of landfills can use this degradation to power equipment and produce electricity.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Bruce Perens (3872)]

Glass is a win, too. Lasts forever in a landfill, but makes great house insulation if you recycle it. Given that sand mining in California is now from underwater, that's got to be a win. Paper and used cartons get bought, so I'd be surprised if they weren't a win too. Out here in Berkeley there's a biowaste can for yard and food waste, and they compost it en masse, with proper temperature and agitation, not like most backyard compost. The city doesn't buy fertilizer, and they get enough extra to hand out sacks of beautiful carbon and nitrogen rich black soil to the residents. Plants shoot up on that stuff. There is a commercial styrofoam recycling plant in Oakland.

So, what's left is plastic.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[amRadioHed (463061)]

There's probably other things, too, that we just take for granted as they are such small impacts on our time (energy), yet add up to significant amounts in aggregate.

I guess that depends on how you define significance. Someone a little down thread figured that the US wasts about 95 man years changing clocks for DST every year. Ok, that sounds like a lot but only if you pretend it isn't an aggregate of millions of peoples time. Any insignificant amount multiplied enough will come out to a significant amount but that doesn't make it significant. I just tried to imagine something that American's spend less time doing than changing their clocks and I drew a blank.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[alshithead (981606)]

"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?

[MoogMan (442253)]

And while you're there, use UTC. There is no sense in using timezones, it just causes pain and suffering for people that talk to others in many different countries.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[SixArmedJesus (513025)]

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.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[Asic Eng (193332)]

Won't that just replace the problem with "what time do you guys start work over there?" If I call a colleague in Australia or India now, and they till me it's "11am here" I at least know what that means in relation to their normal daily routine.

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[QuantumG (50515)]

Take vitamins.. lot safer than being in the Sun. Do you have a family? Every minute you are in the Sun is another chance that you will get skin cancer and DIE.. then who will take care of your kids? Don't you think it is a bit selfish of you to be endangering your life like that? :)

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[vux984 (928602)]

Yeah, and oxygen is what leads to old age and ultimately 'so called' natural death. So breath less. Breath slower. You only have so many. Make them last. ;)

Re:Why not do it like AZ?

[QuantumG (50515)]

Don't get me started on how bad exercise is for you.

Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

[istartedi (132515)]

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.

Re:Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

[amRadioHed (463061)]

If we do away with DST, who says we need to stick with the summer hours all year round? If we keep the winter hours than we get more of that nice daytime after work all year long.

Re:Putting the thermostat above 60 wastes it too

[rrkap (634128)]

You have it backwards. Summer hours give you more daylight after work. Given my choice, I'd switch to DST year round and deal with going to work in the dark.

Or the sample is not enough?

[by 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.

Alternate interpretation

[Sneftel (15416)]

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?

more recreation time & increased economic acti

[Marbleless (640965)]

... 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.

Give me more light in the evening

[PhantomHarlock (189617)]

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)

Letter to my congressional reps

[swm (171547)]

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, ...

Year old paper that came to same conclusion

[Spikeles (972972)]

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 [cdlib.org]

Maybe there should be some kind of central place we could all use to search for papers that have some bearing our subject matter?

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[compro01 (777531)]

We did that here in Saskatchewan. We've been on year-round DST since 1966, a fact the "let's go DST" crowd seems to blissfully ignore.

Re:DST Improves Quality of Life

[Gutboy (587531)]

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 (549451)]

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?