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I'm Deborah, survivor of everything from multiple cancer battles to major business setbacks. Join my search for ways to move the mountains, big & small, that block your path to success.
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The trouble with tweaking time

Golfer and Sunset with Dramatic Clouds

We’re about to go dark.

That means Daylight Savings Time is ending for most of the United States. And you must be thrilled with the money you saved this summer … after all, that’s what DST is all about: saving money. Did you save enough on your energy bills to pay for your holiday shopping? No? A week’s worth of groceries? A tank of gas? Lunch at McDonald’s?

A gumball?

What’s that? You didn’t save any money on your electric bills by having that extra hour of daylight? Well, at least you broke even and the kids had an extra hour to play outside …

Say again? You didn’t break even? Your power bill increased? No, that can’t be right!

But, apparently, it is.

So far, every study assessing the impact of Daylight Savings Time on the economy has found little, if any, positive impact. And thanks to the state of Indiana, we now know fooling with Mother Nature likely has a negative effect on our wallets.

Saving … tee time?

Never an early riser, as a child once the time changed I complained about having to get up in the dead of night for school. My mother always told me to blame golf-loving doctors. She wasn’t far off. While it’s true Benjamin Franklin joked in a 1784 essay about adopting a daylight-savings plan, the idea was first seriously proposed in 1907 by British builder William Willet. Why? Because he loathed having to end his afternoon golf games. Determined to extend his time on the links, Willet lobbied passionately for the cause until his death in 1915. A year later, his idea was adopted by Germany and its World War I allies; Britain and most of Europe soon followed suit. The United States began first embraced DST in 1918.

Indiana, however, was a hard sell. The Hoosiers didn’t adopt statewide daylight savings until 2006—a year after Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, extending DST by about a month to offset rising energy costs.

Because Indiana was new to DST, it provided a perfect comparison study for the University of California–Santa Barbara (UCSB) to determine exactly how much money residents saved by having an extra hour of daylight. The people of Indiana did save a minimal amount in the early spring. But that savings was quickly offset by far greater energy use in the late summer and fall when the extra hour of daylight led to higher afternoon and evening temperatures … and in turn, higher air conditioning costs.

In just the first year, this brilliant idea for saving money and reducing energy consumption cost Indiana alone an additional $8.6 million in higher energy bills. That could be why the practice is now rejected by most of the world. But U.S. advocates still insist—without data to support them—that DST reduces crime, traffic fatalities, and energy consumption.

So four years after learning the cost of daylight savings to just one state was $8.6 million in 2006 dollars, Americans are still trying to tweak the timing of sunrise and sunset themselves rather than letting nature determine when to go dark.

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