March 11th, 2008
By John DeFore
Around the country this week, workers are struggling with the fact that, thanks to Daylight Saving time, many of them will be heading to the office before the sun’s even up. Changing our routines twice a year is worth it, though, given how much energy we save — right?
Maybe not, according to the work of researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Bren school for Environmental Science & Management. There, Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant have studied an area in which the time change actually increases energy use between 1 and 4 percent.
The study was the result of a perfect opportunity to compare DST use with non-use: In Indiana, most of the state refused to go along with the nation-wide clock-change policy until 2006, when the legislature mandated it. That allowed the scholars to compare actual electric-meter readings from the same months of different years; they analyzed over 7 million readings over a three year period and found that buckling to the nation’s DST policy cost Indiana consumers $8.6 million. That’s because whatever households saved in electricity used for lighting was outweighed by heating and cooling costs — we turn on the heat earlier, or use the AC for more of the day, depending on how the cycle of daylight coincides with our wake/sleep pattern.
Asked if his findings were surprising or expected, Kotchen told GRN: “We really didn’t have any expectations one way or the other.” He accepts that what’s true in Indiana may not apply everywhere. “It will certainly be the case that the result will differ by region. Understanding how much will require further research. We, and others, are working on this, but no other place provides such a clean natural experiment as Indiana.”
That further research would mean a lot for policy-makers who have long justified the ritual on grounds of conservation. But anyone who thinks there’s a shortcut to measuring the change’s costs — simply compare energy bills nationwide for the week before and the week after the clock change — should think again: “This is a good way to evaluate the effect of the recent extensions to daylight saving time,” Kotchen acknowledges, “but our research has focused on the overall effect throughout the year. And it seems that there are important differences.”
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