Is not the economy or energy independence or the war.
It's this freakin' Daylight Savings Time thing.
My body likes that one day where you get extra our of sleep in the fall. But I doubt that DST accomplishes what it was meant for.
I get the idea - adding an hour of extra daylight into our waking hours trims down electricity consumption by reducing our need to turn on lights.
But light sources are generally fluorescent now. At least, they burn a lot less energy per bulb than they did 40 years ago. But there are lots more of them because there are lots more of us... so maybe that's a wash. But it's not just lighting costs we need to manage anymore - air conditioning is a huge cost now. I'll do some stupid math to illustrate:
A standard 100 watt lightbulb will burn 100 watt hours in 1 hour. A standard air conditioner might burn 4,000 - 5,000 watt hours in that same time. So say you need five 100 watt lightbulbs to illuminate your home during those winter dark hours. And if the sun still shines you need to run that AC an extra hour. That's 500 watt hours for the lightbulbs vs 5,000 for the AC. Call it a half hour of AC and that's still 5x the power consumption of the lightbulbs. And I may be being conservative with the AC consumption - those window units in Philadelphia don't look efficient to me. Surely I've missed a lot here but the point is that extra daylight might make people run their AC units longer which could be more expensive than the savings in lighting.
I also witnessed hundreds of hours of engineering and ops work to adjust our systems for the change in the DST date 2 years ago. People literally stayed at work on a saturday night with their sleeping bags to make sure that nothing went wrong when the clocks started changing. Billions of dollars spent to make the change + tons of opportunity cost... and not a single report of any energy saved. Total waste of effort.
The Sydney Olympics moved their DST date up 2 months in preparation for their Olympic games. No material change in energy consumption observed.
In all seriousness... no one should ever lift a finger on DST again - we've seen firsthand how expensive it is to mess with. My only appreciation of DST now is the memory of being a little kid who was always very excited to have an hour added to his weekend, and an "extra" hour to sleep on those first few school days after the change. At least, it seemed like an extra hour to me then. I'm off to bed now to enjoy a lovely 8 hours of sleep.
Actually, make that 9!
