let there be light

If DST doesn’t effectively realize household energy savings, then how can we explain its perpetuity as a policy, at least in the U.S.?

 A brief history: from candle conservation to clinging to precious sleep

The father of DST couldn’t have possibly envisioned the future of the simple electricity he observed in a bolt of lightening in the mid-1700’s. Bemoaning the “smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles” in a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784, science luminary Benjamin Franklin proposed a daylight savings period from March to September to reduce candle consumption. Franklin expressed his heartfelt commitment to the principle: “I demand neither place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward whatever. I expect only to have the honor of it.”

Seventy-eight countries (mostly in the Northern Hemisphere) have carried Franklin’s torch by implementing official legislation for DST. We reflexively associate DST with energy savings, but U.S. tradition historically mirrors economic and political considerations. Here is a brief history of the fits and starts of DST policy:

• World War I: The administration of President Woodrow Wilson implements DST for the first time in U.S. history to reduce pressure on the electricity grid and therefore accrue reserves of coal for wartime use. The policy was retracted at the conclusion of the war.
• 1966: The U.S. Department of Transportation is charged with enforcing the Uniform Time Act, which provides for a uniform DST cycle in the United States from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October.
• 1973: The oil embargo prompts the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation, legislating for year-round DST over a period of 15 months.
• 1986: Amendments to the 1966 act extend the DST period by moving the start date to the first Sunday in April.
• 2005: The Energy Policy Act of 2005 further extends the DST period, implementing a start date of the second Sunday in March and an end date of the first Sunday in November. This legislation charges the Department of Energy (DOE) with conducting extensive research by 2007 to vet the energy savings realized by extended DST.

DST around the world: blue: practices DST; orange: used to practice DST; red: has never practiced DST.

The kicker? The DOE has yet to complete this research. So how does the U.S. government justify this long history of fortifying DST policy? Engineer John Lowe of the National Institute of Standards and Technology attributes the policy to anything but science in an interview for the Christian Science Monitor: “Maybe the strongest arguments are convenience and tradition.” My mom, for one, routinely questioned the shorter DST cycles that ended before Halloween, making for spookier trick-or-treating conditions during my childhood. But I think she was hopelessly optimistic—most kids wait for dark, regardless of the time, to begin their candy crusades.

With brains fried: why DST?

Our Stanford-home state of California has tried its hand at justifying DST, but not necessarily at the benefit of public understanding. Let’s do a little sleuthing to illuminate the dubious conclusions. Bob Aldrich, Webmaster for the California Energy Commission (CEC), writes imprecisely on the organization’s website: “One of the biggest reasons we change our clocks to…DST…is that it reportedly saves electricity. Newer studies are being done to see if that long-held reason is true.”

But a CEC report from May 2001 offers a different explanation: money, money, money. The report projected yearly, statewide savings of between $300 million and $900 million based on the premise that winter DST and summer double DST (advancing clocks forward by two hours) would reduce electricity demand during peak afternoon hours. But we certainly can’t streamline our finances without measurable reductions in electricity use; a subsequent May 2007 report, based on megawatt hour (MWh) measurements of electricity use from the California Independent System Operator, concluded that “the extension…of DST…to March 2007 [based on provisions in the Energy Policy Act of 2005] had little or no effect on energy consumption in California.”

Fellow Stanfordians and Californians: rest assured that the nexus of DST and economics persists outside of our sunny state. Michael Downing, the author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of DST (2006), was visiting a San Francisco Zen center at the age of 45 when a light-bulb lit up in his head: why do we practice DST? Mr. Downing cites two “benefits” of DST: “it costs nothing to implement and consumers do not have to conserve energy.” But DST policy is nowhere near free; rather, it externalizes costs by encouraging consumers to spend, spend, spend. DST, empirically a “retail-spending plan,” boosts earnings for the golf, barbecue, Halloween candy, gasoline, and convenience store industries, as Americans engage in material pastimes rather than simply head outside. Whatever happened to reduce, reduce, reduce?

Bright opposition

Independent research teams have taken the reins for responding to this question—and to the claims about energy savings on the CEC website. Before examining these case studies, let’s review the profile of U.S. residential energy consumption (the alleged target of DST):

• As of 2008, the residential sector accounted for 22% of U.S. energy consumption, second to industrial consumption (31%).
• U.S. electricity consumption totaled an astronomic 3,873 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) during the summer of 2008 alone. The residential sector accounted for 1,379 billion kWh, or 35% of total electricity use.
• The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that the average U.S. household consumed 11,040 kWh during 2008, producing 16,336 pounds of CO₂ emissions. A single household’s yearly electricity consumption produces the same emissions as almost two passenger cars or 360 cylinders of propane for barbecuing.

The EIA calculates that lighting accounted for 215 billion kWh, or 15% of residential energy consumption, in 2007. This value fluctuates on a yearly basis between 9% and 15%.

We could justifiably raise questions about the legitimacy of DST based on its focus on the residential sector rather than on the industrial and commercial sectors, but the EIA reported a 7.6% increase in sales of residential electricity during the first three months of 2010 and projects a 7% increase in sales during the coming summer months. With this prediction in mind, let’s continue to focus on the household to learn more about the effects of our everyday practices.

University of California, Santa Barbara Professor Matthew J. Kotchen, writing on behalf of the National Bureau of Economic Research, presents a strong case against the correlation between DST and energy savings, based on his findings from a case study conducted in Indiana between 2004 and 2006. Prior to 2006 legislation, a road trip through Indiana may have been a waking nightmare, with individual counties determining whether or not to practice DST (incidentally, ideal conditions for a comparative experiment). Kotchen’s observations of 250,000 households produced the following results: yearly increases of 61.01 kWh per average household and 166,217,000 total kWh for the state of Indiana. With electricity costing an average of $0.054 per kWh, the additional consumption cost the state of Indiana more than $8,963,371 per year, money that could have been invested by individual households for energy-efficient appliances. Saving some green to be green: yet another reason to introduce the kids to the great outdoors right outside the front door!

Sequestering sunlight: navigating natural and artificial cycles

Let’s entertain one more thought: maybe the problem is the framework rather than the policy, itself. The CEC May 2001 report propounds DST policy “so that the solar day corresponds more closely to our activities.” But rather than abide by energy-inefficient policy that arbitrarily legislates for daybreak and nightfall, I would call for grassroots action—tempering our habits as energy users and consumers and adapting to natural cycles with the health of the Earth in mind.

Sequestering sunlight on White Plaza in Stanford, California.

For the good of the people: making the principles of DST worth our time

“I love summer sunlight, I just don’t like this [DST] as a measure to save energy,” says Downing, who shines light on Congress’ tradition of wielding DST in the absence of meaningful energy legislation and in the interest of satisfying business lobbies. But the policy focus on the energy consumption of individual households flatters us: WE have the power to create more harmony between our activities and the natural cycles of the Earth and Sun with healthy (and fun!) lifestyle changes and adjustments to our household appliances.

Additional resources:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration for statistics on energy consumption.

The Environmental Protection Agency Green Power Equivalency Calculator to learn about the potential energy savings of converting traditional forms of power to Earth-friendly ones.

The Environmental Protection Agency Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator to learn about your electricity-related carbon footprint.

By switching off the lights, cutting shower time and use of heating and cooling, and upgrading to Energy Star appliances, we can wean ourselves off of electricity and dramatically reduce our carbon and ecological footprints. Check out this primer from the National Energy Education Development Project to brush up on the individual components of your household energy consumption. And remember that at the end of the day (longer or shorter), there’s us—adults, college students, and kids—and the world around us, where blue skies and fresh air abound. Let’s turn DST into EST and FCT (fun-creating time) by heading outdoors, where solar power is comforting, plentiful, and best of all, free.

daylight “savings”…a waking nightmare or an earth-inspiring reveille?

When I hopped from the crisp northern California evening into my car at the ripe hour of 3:30 this morning, I crinkled my brow in puzzlement. How had my vehicle (smart enough, but not smart by our ever-modernizing conceptions thereof) known to “spring forward,” in tune with political cycles, if not natural cycles? After a few short seconds, a lightbulb alit in my head: I had never “fallen back.” When I arrived home a short fifteen minutes later, not much had changed. The clock was nearing the 4:00 a.m. zone, I was still awake (and thus at risk of catching a glimpse of early-morning NorCal fog), and daylight savings ticked onward in the most disruptive sense possible. New realities for a new day? Slight “jet lag” and an hour less in which to tackle the mounds of end-of-quarter homework that, alongside daylight savings, present a waking nightmare.

Time after time…

Time and the drive to save energy breed some strange behavior. My dad lit up my childhood with bimonthly field trips into the depths of our basement, where he lectured about the importance of switching lights off while standing next to his sidekick, the household electric meter. The colorful president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, took matters of time into his own hands in 2007, creating a Venezuela-only time zone with a mere thirty-minute alteration to maximize human energy.

And in the United States (without my dad or Mr. Chavez)? In accordance with daylight savings time (DST), we turn our clocks forward one hour in March, based on the premises that we will reduce home electricity consumption, lower electricity prices, and make the most of the day by adding an hour of daylight to the afternoon when we typically return home from work or school. But is the correlation between DST and energy savings fact or fiction? And what does the sporadic adoption of DST across county, state, and nation lines tell us about the certainty of the principle? Let’s rub the sleep from our eyes and take a look.

Sustainable or suspicious policy? The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 may have sanctified DST practice with the addition of two weeks to each cycle, but you’re absolutely right in musing that the correlation between DST and measurable energy savings is dubious—and most likely fictitious.

My sentiments exactly.

The DST focus on residential electricity consumption from lighting underestimates the changes in non-lighting energy consumption of households rising with the roosters and battling the heat of sunny afternoons. Reports based on case studies in Indiana and Australia advance the following principle: if the additional consumption of heating and cooling outweighs the energy savings from decreased lighting demand (if this even occurs), then DST is not an effective mechanism for reducing energy consumption.

In addition to the increases in electricity consumption observed in both Indiana and Australia over a DST cycle, the policy encourages energy-intensive, consumer behavior like driving around in the extra light of day. Researchers in Helsinki, Finland further note that DST saps human energy by disrupting circadian rhythms vital to restful and rejuvenating sleep.

Awakening to the power of household lifestyle changes

So what should we, sleep-deprived residents, make of this energy-inefficient policy? In the absence of meaningful, energy-saving policy, let’s legislate on our own terms:

• § BE AN “ENERGY SAVER”: With heating, cooling, water heating, and refrigeration accounting for approximately 65% of household energy consumption, we could create our own EST—energy savings time—with small-scale behavior and equipment changes. For heating and cooling, you might consider cutting your consumption and instead layering up or down. And for refrigeration, check out the Energy Star appliances website to learn about newer, energy-efficient models on the market today.
• § FUN UNDER THE SUN: DST does provide more afternoon sunlight, so we could recreate the outdoor delight of our childhoods. For surefire energy savings, go for a low-impact activity and soak up some sun—perhaps a walk, bike ride, or shooting some hoops with the neighbors. Let’s switch off our appliances and head outside; my dad and his tired electric meter will thank all of us.

To really improve your household energy efficiency, check out:

• Tips and action steps from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
• The EPA Household Emissions Calculator to measure your at-home footprint.
• Solar Power Info to learn about how you could save with solar panels.