End Daylight Saving Time in Florida?

When homeowners' insurance and property taxes are out of sight, people are losing their homes, crime is on the rise and the State Economy is in crisis, our elected officials are worried about an earth-shattering problem - Daylight Savings Time. Not that it does not merit some attention. The implementation of Daylight Saving Time has been fraught with controversy since Benjamin Franklin conceived of the idea. Even today, regions and countries routinely change their approaches to Daylight Saving Time.

The United States adopted Daylight Saving Time in 1918 to help save electricity.

Florida state Sen. Bill Posey (R-Rockledge) has introduced a bill to end Daylight Saving Time in the state.

A Senate committee recently passed the bill by a 4 to 1 vote. The bill faces two more committee votes before it can go before the full Senate.

According to an article by Shawn McCarthy. "Has daylight saving time fuelled gasoline consumption?", published in the Canadian paper the Globe and Mail DST may increase gasoline consumption: U.S. gasoline demand grew an extra 1% during the newly introduced DST in March 2007

A recent paper on daylight savings time written by Bren School of Environmental Science and Management's Assistant Professor Matthew Kotchen and Bren PhD student Laura Grant presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier in February, tested decades-old conventional wisdom that daylight savings time saves energy and found that, in fact, it increase energy use between 1 and  4 percent.

Bren School of Environmental Science and Management is part of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) was originally implemented to save energy because of less need to use lighting in the evening hours.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 added four weeks (three weeks earlier and one week later) to daylight saving time, making it extended daylight saving time (eDST).

Originally DST was from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. Now, eDST goes from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

However, almost all of Indiana didn’t accept this new time change until spring of 2006 because its farmers had lobbied against it in its first year. Only 15 of 92 Indiana counties accepted eDST in the spring of 2005, while all of Indiana accepted it in 2006.

Thus, Kotchen and Grant compared seven million monthly energy bills from Duke Energy Corporation in southern Indiana over a three-year period involving when Indiana didn’t and did use extended daylight savings time.

Kotchen and Grant found that the use of electrical energy for lighting was reduced in the spring, but there was an increase in the use of electrical energy for cooling and heating in the summer and fall. The increases in energy were greater than in the decreases in energy use, making it more expensive for Indiana to use the extended daylight-saving time plan.

In fact, about a one to four percent increase in energy consumption resulted.

The researchers found that eDST actually costs the citizens more energy, $3.19 per household for a total of $8.6 million.

However, in a Wall Street Journal article (“Daylight Saving Wastes Energy, Study Says”), Massachusetts representative Edward J. Manley says that study is flawed. He states, the study “cannot accurately asses the impact of [daylight-saving time] changes across the nation, especially when it does not include more northern, colder regions."

Kotchen and Grant note that additional research is necessary to validate their conclusion. They would like a similar study in states with high energy consumption, like the western state of California, and the southern states of Florida and Texas.

Senator Jim King believes the extra hour of daylight is worth the aggravation of changing clocks twice a year because it adds an extra hour of sunshine.

Only Hawaii and parts of Arizona do not observe daylight savings time.