Extending Daylight Savings Time a good thing for runners?

Devices have already been mentioned. Primarily PCs. Not just windows PCs. All PCs.

The 100,000 barrel-a-day estimate sounds pie-in-the-sky and needs to be seriously investigated. How exactly did they come up with it. What about all the lights which will now have to stay on for an extra hour in the morning. Why would people driving TO work in the dark not have just as many accidents as people driving home FROM work in the dark did before.

Changing the clocks is not the way to save energy. The push for this is coming from people who do not want to be forced to have to make the actual hard choices we need to make: To make (manufacturers) and use (SUV-driving wastrels) fuel-efficient cars; To install energy-saving appliances. To carpool; To push for alternative fuel sources now.

dukerdog wrote:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/22/congress.daylighttime.ap/index.html

the house giveth, the senate taketh away:

Average_Joe wrote:

The 100,000 barrel-a-day estimate sounds pie-in-the-sky and needs to be seriously investigated. How exactly did they come up with it. What about all the lights which will now have to stay on for an extra hour in the morning. Why would people driving TO work in the dark not have just as many accidents as people driving home FROM work in the dark did before.

Downloading a program to automatically fix this for you would take about 2 minutes and you'd never have to deal with it again.

Cell phones get their time from the satellites so there's no problem there either.

i h8 the facts wrote:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/daylightsaving.html

And here's an interesting quote from that article:

"In the winter, the afternoon Daylight Saving Time advantage is offset by the morning's need for more lighting. In spring and fall, the advantage is less than one hour. So, Daylight Saving Time saves energy for lighting in all seasons of the year except for the four darkest months of the year (November, December, January and February) when the afternoon advantage is offset by the need for lighting because of late sunrise."

Geez, does that sound vaguely familiar to anyone? So, by their own admission, we're really talking about a fraction of one percent per day for a couple of weeks, best case (i.e., a tiny fraction of 1% per year). Also, note that this was a report for California. Those of us in more northerly latitudes will see even less. For morning runners, this is bad news. For the country as a whole, it's a lovely distraction so that we can all think that we're "saving energy" instead of actually doing something substantive (like applying CAFE standards to SUVs and light trucks, focusing on efficiency standards in other areas, or *heaven forbid*, actually getting serious about alternative renewable energy sources instead of sucking down petroleum like there's no end to it).

And to the fools who don't believe people like me walked 1.5 miles each way to high school, most kids walked, and some walked a lot farther. Maybe that's one reason why as a graduating class we weren't as fat as present day HS grads.

PhilP wrote:

All the Windows based PC's are programmed to automatically change your system time when DST starts and ends on the traditional start of April and end of October. Now everyone will need to change the time manually in March and November. Also, you will need to switch the time back to the correct time when your PC switches it on the normal begining and end of DST. What fun.

Man. The hard work never ends.

In case it was missed, Congress modified this proposal to lengthen Daylight Savings Time by one month total.

Now the new Day Light Savings period adds one week in the fall, ending the first Sunday in November. And it will begin the second week in March, three weeks prior to the current starting point of the first Sunday in April.

Another viewpoint

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006998

I see pros and cons; better for some, worse for others.

The fact that the projection is from the 70s does not necessarily mean it is true or that the savings would be greater. Everything you have today is far more fuel efficient that it was 30 years ago. Of course you probably have more things in your house that consume energy than a house did 30 years ago.

Phil-I would bet anything that Microsoft will handle this through a Windows Update. As long as you keep up with Automatic Updates you probably won't notice anything.

Here are some figures to consider:

Current USA oil consumption is nearly 20 million barrels per day. One of the DST-adjustment sponsoring Senators is claiming 100,000 barrels saved per day, or about .5%. A California study from the early 90's projected a .5% average reduction if DST was extended for the entire month of March. I imagine the results would not be identical in more Northely lattitudes, but let's use .5% as at least two sources seem to concur. The plan is to do this for 4 weeks total, yielding an annual energy consumption savings of less than .04%. Yes, that's 4 one-hundredths of one percent. That's roughly equivalent to shaving 200 feet off of a 100 mile week. Does anyone think this wlll make a real difference?

In contrast, suppose we were to increase the fuel efficiency standards of passenger cars and light trucks as mentioned by a few posters. Let's be very conservative and boost efficiency by a mere 1 MPG. 40% of our oil is used by this class of vehicle (2/3 of all oil goes to the transportation sector as a whole, so we're not even figuring in heavy or mass transport efficiency improvements). The fleet average is currently a little over 24 MPG for cars and light trucks combined. A 1 MPG increase is about a 4% reduction in usage, or about 1.6% of total consumption. That represents FORTY TIMES as much savings as the DST change. Now here's the real kicker: In the late 1980's, light trucks made up only 28% of the fleet versus about 50% today (the SUV in its present form didn't even exist for the most part). The fleet average at that time was approximately 2 MPG higher than it is today. Yep, if simply went back to populating the roads with personal cars instead of personal trucks/SUVs, we'd save EIGHTY TIMES the projection from the DST change. That, of course, does not include the design efficiency increases from the past 15 years, so the real savings would be higher (i.e., those same types and sizes of vehicles from the late 1980's would be more efficient using today's engines).

Regarding general energy usage over the decades, here's a listing of the average yearly energy consumption per US consumer (from Edison Electric Institute):

1960: 3.8 MWh (Mega-Watt-hours)

1970: 7 MWh

1980: 9 MWh

1990: 9.5 MWh

2000: 10 MWh

Keep in mind that in the 1970 census pegged the USA at about 205 million. We are now approaching 300 million. So, there's more of us, and we're each using more energy than ever before. We're not consuming less energy either country-wide, or per-capita. The USA represents about 5% of the global population but uses about a quarter of the energy.

There might be good reasons to extend DST but let's not fool ourselves that it's going to do squat about our energy picture.