Daylight Saving Time
The newly-passed Energy Policy Act of 2005 is a juicy 1,724 pages of policies, programs, and pork, “An Act to ensure jobs for our future with secure, affordable, and reliable energy.” The Administration and Congress apparently felt that extending Daylight Saving Time for a month would help to “ensure jobs for our future….” As a result of the Act, Daylight Saving Time will begin three weeks earlier and end a week later. In theory, DST reduces energy consumption because people spend more time outdoors after work, and need to turn their lights on later in the evening.
DST has always been controversial, and individual states and territories can “opt out” of it. At this writing DST is observed in 70 countries around the world; most of them follow the U.S. dates although the change is reversed in the southern hemisphere, as are the seasons. In the U.S., DST is not observed in Arizona (except for the Navajo Indian Reservation), the Eastern time zone portion of Indiana, Hawaii and the Pacific territories.
Proponents of DST usually carry the day, on the grounds that DST results in measurable energy savings. In the debate leading up to the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, they pointed to two studies which were said to indicate that energy savings on the order of 1% were achieved with DST. That was the finding of a federal study conducted in 1970, and we won’t quibble with it beyond observing that 1% savings in energy consumption does not imply a 1% reduction in the requirement for oil imports. Our energy comes from several sources, some of which are renewable. The other cited study was conducted by the State of California in support of its petition to Congress to make Daylight Saving Time effective year-round. We have often thought that DST would make more sense in the winter than in the summer: in the middle of winter, in median latitudes, DST might move sunset from 5pm to 6pm. That would seem to be far more useful than moving it from 9pm to 10pm in the middle of the summer. But it’s moot, because California was evidently unable to quantify the energy savings, and their proposal came right around the time of the Sept. 11th events so it didn’t get a whole lot of attention from Congress or anybody else..
You can visit the California Energy Commission‘s web site where they argue strongly in favor of Daylight Saving Time, but their own study gets pretty short shrift. They say that a study was commissioned, but they do not say that it demonstrated meaningful energy savings, and we think it is reasonable to assume that the study would have been prominently featured if it had supported the conservation argument. What’s more, the cited page suggests that you “look for” the study, which turns out to be a staff report that concludes: winter DST and something called “Double DST” in the summer “would probably save marginal amounts of electricity….” Probably. Marginal. The estimates are one half of one percent in the winter, and one fifth of one percent in the summer. At least they support our contention that DST makes more sense in the winter. But California’s concern was the frequent brownouts that occurred during the summer of 2000 due to inadequate supply, and their projection of summer savings was largely a result of shifting the demand peak– not a reduction of consumption at all.
OK, let’s summarize. The main justification for DST is energy savings, and the federal government found in 1970 that DST could reduce consumption by 1%. In 2001 the California state government found that there would probably be marginal cost reduction if they introduced Winter DST and Summer Double DST. In other words, proponents of DST and its extension have only one justification: a 30 year old study. What could possibly have changed in a mere 30 years.
Well… we speak from experience here… the greatest risk of brownouts and blackouts resulting from excessive demand is during the early evening hours during the summer!
You could easily make a case that demand would be dramatically reduced if the sun set an hour earlier rather than an hour later. That’s because there are two significant evolutions in the typical American’s lifestyle– we have residential air conditioners, and we have a wealth of electronic entertainment that we can enjoy in the air-conditioned comfort of our homes after work. Doesn’t an “extra hour of daylight” allow us to participate in more outdoor activities? You bet. Now we have time to dash home after work, turn on the A/C (which will run an extra hour) and hop in the old SUV (also air-conditioned) for a quick run over to the golf course. So we can sit in the clubhouse and get drunk in airconditioned comfort.
Ignorance on the part of our representatives in D.C. is not particularly helpful:
“The beauty of daylight-saving time is that it just makes everyone feel sunnier.” –Rep. Edward Markey, D-Massachusetts
“Kids across the nation will soon rejoice, because they’ll have another hour of daylight trick-or-treating.” –Rep. Fred Upton, R-Michigan
Fred, you almost made us cry with that one. It’s for the children! But when’s the last time trick-or-treaters came to your door without being “escorted” by a parent cruising slowly down the street in a car?
We wouldn’t want to suggest that the extension of DST is a double-secret karlrovian plot to get us to buy more foreign oil. After all, that would be un-American.
–SG
What do you think? Please enter a comment below.
August 3rd, 2005 at 4:25 pm
How ridiculous! I’m supposed to make my kids go to school before dawn and go to bed before sunset? Besides almost every business is 24 hours now so what difference does it make? That sure makes me feel sunny! What a dick.
August 3rd, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Yeah what a bunch of morons. Energy policy my ass.
August 4th, 2005 at 12:20 pm
I can’t argue with this article and the idea that extending daylight savings will not decrease energy cost or demand.
One point I would like to make about the new Energy Policy is its “proposals” for using more clean coal, ethanol, and most importantly nuclear energy as fuels for our energy needs.
I think one of our biggest economic disaster potentials we currently have, is due to our reliance on crude oil purchased from other countries. The possibility that our supply chain can be seriously interrupted causing a major economic burden for our country, is very real.
Although this new Energy Policy does not come close to fixing our reliance on foreign oil, it does get the ball rolling, even if it is only one inch in a thousand mile race.
Over the past 20 years or so, our country has chosen to decrease our coal and nuclear generation output. Very few new coal plants have been built and no nuclear power plants have been built. Everybody seemed to be concerned with the environmental issues surrounding these two fuel sources. This has caused our Utility industry to spend most of their investments in Natural Gas power plants. Natural gas is a very clean fuel when burned to generate energy, but the price of natural gas has sky rocketed in recent years. Also our increased reliance of Natural Gas for generation has increased our reliance on foreign energy sources because we are not curbing our appetite for electricity usage, but increasing it year over year. (Drilling in Alaska would do almost nothing to help our supply of natural gas. I’m glad it was left out of the bill.)
So a small baby step is the incentives for utility companies to invest in clean coal and nuclear power generation. Both coal and nuclear energy are very in expensive, and can be home grown.
Coal- we have a 250-year supply of coal available in our country (could be less, could be more). We have new technologies that allow coal to be burned with equal emissions as natural gas. We need to tap into these technologies. Coal is much cheaper than natural gas ($40-$80 per mw of generation). This could actually curb or decrease our utility bills for every American.
Nuclear- we have the technology to safely build and operating nuclear power plants. The fears in the past over nuclear power plants have been the risk of meltdown and what to do with spent fuel. The risks of meltdown and accidents have greatly diminished with new technology developed in the past 20 years. Spent fuel is still and issue, but I think we could figure it out, and we would not be at the same risk of economic disaster if our foreign energy supply were disrupted. And once again nuclear energy is much cheaper than natural gas.
The energy policy may have its faults, but to be positive, it could be step in the right direction.
(I skipped ethanol, but can it really hurt our farmers to have another market to sell their crops?)
August 4th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
We’re working on a more general discussion of the Energy Policy Act and might want to reproduce your comments there. You obviously have a good handle on energy supply/distribution issues so we hope you will find time to turn your attention to the other energy sources that can contribute a reduced dependence on foreign oil, including ethanol of course but also “biodiesel,” hydrolectric, solar, wind, and even tidal. Thanks…. SG
August 5th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
This maybe a comment that should be used on a later article, but this is kind of an online discussion forum, so I’ll continue this discussion.
Bottom line is we need to reduce our dependency on foreign oil supplies by finding our own countries sources and finding alternate fuel sources.
Biodiesel and tidal energy sources are very interesting and I would hope that we would explore those options more in the future. Technology should be used more and any national energy policy should provide incentives for exploration of these technologies and not worry about day light savings time.
Every new house built in our country should have solar energy sources installed. And every other house should have a tax incentive to upgrade those houses. Solar energy, just like all the other energy sources we are talking about, is a great idea and should be used now, but I’m afraid our country won’t make a change until we have super high energy prices for foreign oil, and it really starts to cripple our economy.
Hydroelectric energy is also a super cheap energy source and it is really the only way to store energy (water can be stored in reservoirs, and spilled over dams at a later date). The only draw back is the effects of damns on our environment. Hydroelectric power falls into the same category as nuclear energy. Right now the environmental concerns seem to out weight our incentive to build new hydro and nuclear facilities. Utility companies are spending a lot of resources upgrading the dams they already have to maximize energy output. But I really don’t see any new dams being built anytime soon. Should they, or shouldn’t they, is a great debate.
Wind energy is a whole other problem. Most consumers take for granted that every time they go to turn on their lights or air conditioning, that electricity will be available. All we do is flip a switch and we are good to go. But one of the main regulations of our utility providers is RELIABILITY. The economic fall out from a huge black out can be a nightmare and the government highly regulates utility providers to make sure they have enough generation or capacity available for consumer demand. Wind is not a reliable energy source, and back up energy sources are needed to supplement wind energy.
Our entire electrical grid in the US is interconnected through high voltage transmission lines. Every utility company is linked to their neighbor, and so on. If there is a disturbance or loss of frequency in California, it affects Colorado too. It’s all one big system or grid. Wind generation is one of the most unreliable energy sources. When the wind is blowing it is a great source of cheap energy. But often the wind changes dramatically and instantaneously. The energy system or grid has to have another energy source ready to replace the loss of supply when the wind quits blowing. These needs are called “reserves”. The fastest acting reserves are?……..You guessed it, Natural Gas turbines. Coal and nuclear power plants take a long time to move their generating output up or down (this movement is called “Control”). So every time we add more wind generation, in order to keep the system reliable, we have to have more natural gas turbines available to back the wind up. The idea is to find a way to decrease our demand for natural gas.
For the most part, Europe has given up on their push to use Wind energy. They have been far ahead of the curve over the past 30 years in building wind energy facilities. But they have found out that it isn’t all it is cracked up to be.
October 29th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
It would be easy enough to run a rough post-hoc study to investigate your hypothesis.
Since Arizona does not use DST, simply compare their usage with other states that do. NM, for example, might be particularly useful given the geographical similarities. If there is a meaningful difference, it should be evident.