Lo$$ From Daylight Saving Time (DST)?

After losing* sleep over Spring forward, I came across an interesting perspective about the DST on The Wall Street Journal. To begin with, the DST was made into law mainly to save energy. The logic is, say, normally we deal with four hours of darkness after coming from work at 6 PM (assume that it gets dark at 6 PM) and go to bed at 10 PM. If we push our clocks forward in Spring by an hour, we will deal with only 3 hours of darkness; from 7 PM to 10 PM. So, on having sunlight between 6 PM and 7 PM, many of us would feel like staying outdoors, and this reduces the use of TVs, lights, etc. Also, less movement in darkness means less crime and less accidents. Good, at least in theory.

However, Mr. Kotchen of UC-Santa Barbara conducted research on this matter and found that:

...an extra hour of daylight in the evenings may mean less electricity is spent on lights, it also means that houses are warmer in the summer when people come home from work. Conversely, during daylight-saving time's cooler months, people may crank up the thermostats more in the morning.

His argument is, if it is warmer than normal when we come home from work, we will crank up our air conditioners and this will cost us more. Similarly, by getting up earlier on colder mornings, we will likely turn up the heat, spending more energy on heating (i.e., if not for the DST, we would be fast asleep, and will not bother to get up to turn up the thermostat**).

It doesn't matter who is right or who is wrong. I think it is good to research on things like this as "energy saved = energy produced". Also, it is the small leaks that sink big ships!

*on going to bed at 11 PM and waking up at 5 PM, and getting only 5 hours of sleep:-(

** I think, by not cranking up thermostat, we will lose more body heat (than normal), compensate for by eating more, offsetting the savings on heating bills - the law of conservation of energy:-)