Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Daylight Savings Time Increases Costs
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "OFF-TOPIC" @ 08:00 AM
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-daylight0303,0,924321.story
As anyone with a computer knows that pays any attention to the updates their system receives, support personnel for operating systems and time management applications have spent a lot of time preparing daylight savings time patches for all manner of computing devices. We are often told that DST saves energy. There was a unique opportunity recently to study this claim as the state of Indiana in the US converted to DST in 2006.
"Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings. "I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this," says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month."
So you save a bit on some incandescent lighting. More and more people are switching to the florescent bulbs in their lights anyway, which saves a ton of energy. What is happening though is people are cranking up the AC when they get home an hour earlier because the house is warmer and turning up the heat a bit in the morning because it is still dark and the sunlight hasn't had a chance to creep into your windows providing a bit of warmth. Don't you just love it when politicians get it in their head some preconceived notion of how the world works and start driving forward oblivious to the facts? And who pays? You and I. And that doesn't account for the time wasted by IT departments and end users trying to figure out the various tool to fix their software to correspond to the ever changing DST rules around the world.
I'd be perfectly happy if they just got rid of DST and if politicians would quit telling me how the world works and legislating my behavior to fit their idea of being a good steward of the planet.
As anyone with a computer knows that pays any attention to the updates their system receives, support personnel for operating systems and time management applications have spent a lot of time preparing daylight savings time patches for all manner of computing devices. We are often told that DST saves energy. There was a unique opportunity recently to study this claim as the state of Indiana in the US converted to DST in 2006.
"Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings. "I've never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this," says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month."
So you save a bit on some incandescent lighting. More and more people are switching to the florescent bulbs in their lights anyway, which saves a ton of energy. What is happening though is people are cranking up the AC when they get home an hour earlier because the house is warmer and turning up the heat a bit in the morning because it is still dark and the sunlight hasn't had a chance to creep into your windows providing a bit of warmth. Don't you just love it when politicians get it in their head some preconceived notion of how the world works and start driving forward oblivious to the facts? And who pays? You and I. And that doesn't account for the time wasted by IT departments and end users trying to figure out the various tool to fix their software to correspond to the ever changing DST rules around the world.
I'd be perfectly happy if they just got rid of DST and if politicians would quit telling me how the world works and legislating my behavior to fit their idea of being a good steward of the planet.
