

Daylight Saving Wastes Energy - muriithi
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120406767043794825-UOLcfJA8x9Gw9ozbCz77MiLmtaE_20080327.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

======
gcv
Fascinating stuff. I wish a northern state, like Montana, would try a similar
experiment in half of its counties, and ditch daylight saving time for a year
and see what happens. I suspect it would save money, too.

On a slightly more hackerish note: I worked on a power trading system, and it
would break like hell twice a year, on DST switch days. Because electricity
trades on an hourly basis (except in Texas, which uses 15-minute intervals),
everyone who deals with aggregating power flow or power over the course of a
day, ends up writing a loop like "for (hour = 0; hour < 24; hour++) { ... }",
which is totally wrong. The spring forward day has 23 hours, and the fall back
day has 25. That code therefore breaks twice a year and loses money because
(a) it needs to be fixed, and (b) it did its accounting wrong. I hope studies
examining the economic efficiency of DST take this sort of thing into account.
Probably not.

~~~
Electro
Probably not, but I'm used to living way more north than Montana and actually
more northern than London where the time change is based on for the UK. I have
to say it is needed no matter the economic effect, when for over 2 months you
see no sunlight what so ever during a working day it has an abysmal effect on
worker efficiency.

I have only observations to base this on, but workers start dropping off well
before 'flu season'. I do a lot of work outside and I find the comments about
DST harming farming to be irrelevant; the main one is that harvesting labour
becomes in efficient as crops have to be harvested after the dew. If I didn't
need workers at 6am I'd tell them to come in at 7 or 8am when the crops are
ready to be harvested. That's just common sense; if I'm working outside, I'm
not going until it's safe for me to do it and if its too dark I'll tell the
customer I'm coming later, if they don't like it lump it.

Although, on my more hackerish note: 2 million candela torch + power inverter
= sun rise at 3am. I believe it's supposed to produce sunlight-like brightness
over some 450m^2, although it isn't always useful and without it being hooked
up to some form of power it's out of batteries within 15 minutes.

