By Nicola Twilley

Two weeks since Daylight Saving Time ended, and I still can’t cope with how early it’s getting dark. It’s hard not to feel as though my after-work hour of sunshine has been stolen away. Of course, changing the clocks back doesn’t really make an hour of sunshine disappear. Daylight Saving might more transparently be called Daylight Shifting: each place on earth has a set number of hours of light each day, and in spring and fall, many places change their clocks in order to match those daylight hours with the times when they are most useful.

There is an element of “Saving” to the practice of moving our clocks back and forth, however. When the idea was first suggested by Benjamin Franklin in 1784, he calculated that Paris could save 96 million pre-revolutionary French pounds in candle wax and tallow just by rising earlier in the summer. Although his suggestion was made as a joke, when Daylight Saving Time was first formally introduced, initially by Germany and then by Britain and the USA, during World War I, it was for the same reasons of fuel conservation and economy originally noted by Franklin.

During World War II, according to Seize the Daylight author David Prerau, all the nations involved introduced year-round Daylight Saving Time, with Britain going even further by adopting Double Summer Time (moving two hours forward). More recently, the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent energy crisis prompted Congress to extend daylight saving time again, with significant results:

“The U. S. Department of Transportation found that with almost no cost as compared to other energy conservation options, DST reduced the national electrical load in the U.S. by over 1%, saving 3,000,000 barrels of oil each month.” (David Prerau)

In 2006, we’re faced with an even greater need to conserve energy. Should we move to year-round Daylight Saving Time again? As it happens, the largely disappointing 2005 Energy Policy Act has extended DST for a few extra weeks. In 2007, Halloween trick-or-treating will take place during the daylight, as Standard Time won’t kick in until the first Sunday in November. And we won’t “Spring Forward” anymore, because DST will start on the second Sunday in March, before the equinox on March 20. Congress will then receive a report on the energy impact of the change, before deciding whether to stick with the new DST dates.

Meanwhile, in May 2001, at the height of the state’s energy crisis, the California Energy Commission published a very interesting study exploring exactly how effective year-round state-wide DST could be. The full report is available here, with full details of the Commission’s methodology and assumptions.

The bottom line is that if California adopted year-round DST, we would save about 3400 MWh per day, or 0.5 percent of current consumption. We would also reduce peak demand by about three percent, with possible savings of $60-$350 million (the range is due to the huge historical fluctuations in energy prices.) The report shows that even if November, January, and December are left on Pacific Standard Time (when sunrise can already be as late as 7:00 a.m.), California could achieve considerable savings in energy consumption by extending DST.

Some states chose not to implement Daylight Saving Time (Arizona and Hawaii)—but how about we choose never to switch back to Standard Time? There are drawbacks, of course: transport schedules will be affected, the fire department will have to pick a new day to remind us to change our smoke alarm batteries, and early morning joggers will be out of luck. And of course, simply extending DST is not going to reduce our energy consumption to a sustainable level on its own. But I’m not a morning person anyway, and if it was worth doing in 1973, surely it’s worth doing now, when the need is even more urgent? Maybe California can lead the way!