March 9, 2009--Daylight Spending Time

This business of springing forward an hour in the spring (and the equally mnemonically falling back in the fall) appears to have been the brainchild of Benjamin Franklin, who thought that by having a little more daylight in the evening people would not have to burn as many candles. Thus, in a manner of thinking, DST from its inception was an energy saving idea.

So how have we been doing in regard to conserving energy since DST, or as it was called--Summer Time, began to be widely phased in since the 1940s?

In 1975 a federal government study showed that Daylight Savings Time reduced the nation’s electricity usage by a small but significant amount. By about one percent a day. This was because less electricity was used for lighting and small appliances.

The amount of energy people used was found to be related to the time when they went to bed at night and got up in the morning. Most electricity and other forms of energy were consumed in the evenings when families were at home cooking and watching TV and such. So by having more evening daylight less energy was used.

And though in the spring and summer the 70 percent of the population who woke up before sunrise used more energy than if DST were not in effect, the savings from less use in the evening more than offset this.

Thus, case closed, it’s a no-brainer—Daylight Savings Time is a good thing and maybe it should even be extended. Actually, a few years ago it was when we were required to move our clocks ahead earlier in March than in the past.

In our current energy conservation way of thinking, one would expect that some voices would be raised to add an extra hour so that we could save even more daylight and in the process use less electricity.

Actually, the opposite is true.

Some are calling for its elimination, claiming that if you think about this in a nationwide or a worldwide way, if you add up all the BTUs we use when we move clocks ahead an hour, we may actually be consuming more energy than if we left them alone.

Since the 1970s the population has shifted south to warmer climates and thus when considering energy savings you have to take air conditioning into consideration. Longer, hotter day-lit evenings cause families to keep the AC on longer and we know how energy consuming that is. Also, moving south even just a thousand miles, as here in Florida, means living closer to the equator, where there is always 12 each of day and night, which in turn means that days are longer in the winter and spring and shorter in the summer.

Then since 1975 when the feds did their study many more women have joined the workforce which means that during the day, when they had been traditionally home working as homemakers, less power is being used. On the other hand, more energy is consumed at their work places.

To make things even more complicated, when DST came into widespread use it was left to each state to decide whether or not to institute it. Not all did. Even today Arizona and I think Hawaii as well as Puerto Rico do not move their clocks around—they stay on Standard Time all year long. (Which is another reason John McCain lost the election. Think about it—how can you claim to be about the future when your state is stuck back in time?)

And since Indiana didn’t opt to begin DST until 2006 it became a contemporary laboratory to see how much energy was saved by the switchover. It turns out to be not much. In fact, since 2006, counter intuitively, Indiana has seen its energy consumption rise by one percent. (Read linked New York Times article for the details.)

This may not seem like a lot, but one percent here and one percent there adds up. And there are other social costs as well—increased pollution emissions from this increase in energy use it is estimated will cost the state about an equal amount of additional money, not to mention the effect on the environment and the health of citizens.

I don’t pretend to know how to calculate the implications of all of this but know for certain that, unlike in Franklin’s day, we stocked up on candles recently not just to put more romance into our evening dinners but because at this time of year we are moving into power-failure season and will need them to supplement our flashlights. Which makes me wonder how much electricity we’ll be saving during those energy saving blackouts.

One thing I do know, I’m typing this in the dark, am half asleep, and have to wait an extra hour to get my coffee.