It’s called Daylight Savings Time because they keep you in the dark

By Brian Boyko
Last Thursday, I made sure to patch my work computer, running Windows XP, for the Daylight Savings Time switch. This past weekend, I made sure to update my TZ database for my Linux home system, as well as patch the computer’s Windows partition (for gaming) and the XP session that I run virtually. I also made sure to patch my laptop, and helped talk my friends and family through patching their computer over the phone. I even called my cellphone company to ensure that my cellphone would continue working and display the correct time after the changeover.
But I forgot to set my alarm clock. I thought it would auto-update, but I had confused it with an alarm clock I used when I was a student, and which I no longer have.
I made a decision based on bad data. C’est la vie.
Anyway, the federally mandated changeover to Daylight Savings Time has come and gone, and I hope everything has gone smoothly for those of you working in datacenters and IT departments.
The troubling thing though, is that for all the sound and fury, will the Daylight Savings Time switchover actually accomplish anything, and did the decision to extend Daylight Savings occur because Congress was basing it on a study conducted over 30 years ago – before the multiple-TV and personal computer household?
It looks like Congress made the decision based on bad data, and many people are explaining that there is little benefit to the time change and it may even be counterproductive.
(Continued…)

According to this study from Adrienne Kandel [PDF] and the Electricity & Demand Analysis Division of the California Energy Commission:

There is no clear evidence that electricity will be saved from the earlier start to daylight saving time on March 11, but the 7 p.m. peak load will probably drop on the order of 3% for the remainder of March, lowering capacity requirements. This could be negated by a new morning spike as it was in Australia in 2000, but that appears unlikely. In any event, capacity constraints usually do not occur in March and early November.

Ryan Kellog and Hendrik Wolff, postgraduate students at the Univeristy of California at Berkeley, studied similar measures in Australia and also found no differences.

“Our results show that the extension failed to conserve electricity,” they wrote.

“If it’s dark enough in the morning that pretty much everyone has to turn on the lights,” said co-author Kellogg, “what that means is that that increase in morning electricity consumption is going to be so big that it offsets any benefits we get from the extra light in the evening.”

In fact, the two said, shifting Australians’ clocks led to a tiny increase in power use.

“The response I’ve been getting when talking to people is, ‘Well, why are we doing this if this doesn’t save any energy?’” said Kellogg.

And perhaps the most interesting is that Prof. Michael Downing at Tufts University believes that consumption, not conservation, is at the root of Daylight Savings Time. To quote an NPR interview with him:

“People go out and spend money… Retail stores love daylight savings, because when we have an hour of sunlight after work, Americans tend to go shopping. The first and most persistent lobby for daylight savings in this country was the Chamber of Commerce, because they understood that if department stores were lit up, people would be tempted by them.”

“In 1986 Congress gave us an extra month of daylight savings time – that’s when we went from 6 to 7 months. In those congressional hearings, the golf industry alone told Congress one additional month of daylight savings was worth $200M in additional sales of golf clubs and greens fees. The barbecue industry said it was worth $100M in sales in grills and charcoal briquettes.”

So if you were wondering why you were busting your hump last week trying to get all your patches applied and your Blackberries working, it’s good to know that, in the end, it’s all worth it. Right?
You’re not going to make good decisions based on poor data. You need to be aware of what’s really on your network and how it is performing before deciding upon network and IT policy.
Later this week we hope to have some more examples of bad data misinforming important decisions.