Daylight Savings Time Saves Energy or Not? « It\’s Getting Hot In Here

Daylight Savings Time Saves Energy or Not?

Published by lizveazey, March 13th, 2007 Efficiency , Politics 1 Comment

In the United States this year, we started daylight savings time three weeks early this Sunday and we’ll fall back three weeks later in the fall. This change was made under the premise that it would lead to energy savings. There have been some studies that show home energy savings, but apparently more light after work encourages folks to go out and drive somewhere increasing oil consumption and many of these folks go shopping, thus increasing consumption. read more in this post from AutoBlogGreen.

1 Response to “Daylight Savings Time Saves Energy or Not?”

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1 Liz Veazey Apr 6th, 2007 at 3:29 pm

here’s an updated from Greenwire:

Daylight-saving time changes caused record car usage, feds say

The congressionally mandated change in the scheduling of daylight-saving time this year, which moved the start date up by three weeks from the first Sunday in April to March 11, caused record amounts of gasoline usage, the Energy Department announced this week.

DOE said that average daily gasoline demand for the three weeks after the time change rose 2.8 percent from the same period one year ago and was the highest ever for the period.

Congress enacted the change as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 in order to increase national energy efficiency.

“Daylight saving simply pushes us out of our houses,” said Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time.

He added that the extra hour of light at day’s end leads people to drive to places, such as golf courses, parks and shopping malls, which they otherwise would not. “We simply know that when Americans go to the mall, they don’t walk,” Downing said (USA Today, April 6).

Utilities reported this week that the time change has had little impact on electricity usage thus far (Greenwire, April 4). — RJD

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About Liz

While at the University of North Carolina, Liz led one of the first successful campus renewable energy campaigns in the southeast and won the Morris K. Udall scholarship in both 2002 & 2003. She organized the first Southeast Student Renewable Energy Conference April 2-4, 2004, to engage other Southern schools beyond UNC in energy and climate work. In the summer of 2004 she became a co-founding member of Energy Action Coalition, which she has been actively involved with since then. She co-chaired the Energy Action Coalition Steering Committee for 2 years and is Executive Director of the Southern Energy Network, which works with students in the Southeast on clean energy and climate initiatives as part of Energy Action Coalition's Campus Climate Challenge. In late fall 2005, she attended the UN Climate Negotiations in Montreal and helped start www.itsgettinghotinhere.org . In 2008, she joined the board of the Highlander Research and Education Center (www.highlandercenter.org).

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