20080309 dst costs more - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: DST Costs More link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/dst-costs-more/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 556 created: 2008/03/09 15:50:28 created_gmt: 2008/03/09 15:50:28 comment_status: open post_name: dst-costs-more status: publish post_type: post

DST Costs More

Thanks to some researchers at the University of California, we now know that people actually use more energy during Daylight Saving Time (DST). Digging deeper than the mass media report on this, I found the research paper by Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant entitled, Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Indiana.

Basically what they found was that in Indiana, a state that did not wholly convert to DST until recently, there was a statewide net increase in electricity use of around $8 million a year due to DST. The main reason for this was that while use of electricity for lighting decreased, the use of electricity for heating increased even more.

That’s an interesting addition to the obvious evidence for another cost of DST much closer to home for IT people: an estimated $200 to $300 million for activities related to “operational changes, planning and patching associated with the DST change” in 2007 according to Forester Research’s Jeffrey Hammond.

But Hammond’s estimate is way too low in my opinion. It assumes an average of 6 tech people in every public company involved in the changes. In the modest sized Fortune 500 company I work for (12,000 total employees), that number was actually more like 15 to 20 because today’s need for specialization requires participation from every element of the production support team to get the job done. In addition, the veritable waterfall of last minute patches and bug fixes to patches from nearly every IT vendor added considerably to the initial cost because those same people were forced to do the work over, and over, again.

The bottom line? The DST change last year probably cost the country a lot more in energy and administrative costs than anyone realized, with a good part of that cost recurring every year when it’s in effect.

Of course there is a benefit from DST, albeit not in energy savings.

One study found that when DST is in effect, there was a 13% decline in pedestrian fatalities and a 3% decline in vehicle passenger fatalities.

And maybe that should be just enough of a real savings for us all.