Why Daylight Saving Could Exacerbate Europe’s Energy Crisis

Linked to productivity slumps and increases in heart attacks, car crashes and even crime, this relic of attempts to maximize working hours during World War I has somehow hung on despite expert doubts of its and widespread unpopularity. Even European Union commitments to dispense with daylight saving have been put on the back burner as the union focuses on tackling more pressing issues, such as Covid, Brexit, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis.

Now, however, a new, topical argument has emerged in Europe for dispensing with bi-annual clock changes. Getting rid of daylight saving could ease the continent’s energy crisis. With the war in Ukraine sending fuel prices soaring, campaigners and politicians in several countries have noticed that daylight saving could be making demand for fuel more acute. In Italy, the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine has called for the time shift to end, noting that even simply postponing the clock change from the end of October to the end of November would save the country 70 million euros in fuel bills. In Ireland, a senator has also called to scrap the change on energy-saving grounds — a move the Minister of State for Health has said the government might consider if Ireland remained in alignment with the rest of the EU and the UK.

Interest in ending clock changes in Ireland in particular seems to have been sparked by professor Aoife Foley, an energy systems expert at Queens University Belfast who recently shared the findings of as-yet-unpublished research on clock changes and energy consumption via Irish and Northern Irish radio. Working with a small team of post-graduate students and looking at typical household size and consumption patterns, professor Foley has calculated that abolishing daylight saving could save households in England, Scotland and Wales between 1.2 billion pounds and 2.3 billion pounds a year depending on the tariff paid. This financial saving would also be a win for the environment. Foley calculates that the Republic of Ireland could reduce its carbon emissions by 3.48% from the decrease in residential electricity usage alone.

The reason getting rid of daylight saving could deliver such clear benefits, as Foley suggests, is strikingly simple. When it gets darker later in the day, people turn their lights on later. In the UK and Ireland, daily energy demand peaks between 5pm and 7pm, with winter demand starting to rise sharply just before 4pm — a time at which (at least on overcast days in deep winter) sunlight fades away. Without a clock change, twilight would not start encroaching until around five, which would defer and spread out the daily surge in electricity use when night starts to fall.

The apparent pitfall to this argument would be that abolishing daylight saving could simply shift that electricity consumption to the now-darker morning hours, without actually delivering an overall cut. This wouldn’t happen, suggests Foley, because even with daylight saving still in place, households in Britain and Ireland tend to turn on their lights on winter mornings anyway, because it’s often too murky without them. Furthermore, many workers have already left home for work before full daylight arrives as it is. In other words, darker mornings would not necessarily mean substantially more lighting use — because in most British and Irish households, the lights are already on.

Daylight saving is in place despite needlessly straining our energy supplies, says Foley, because it was a response to conditions in the early 20th century that were very different from today’s.

“When they introduced it last century” she told Bloomberg CityLab, “people were all getting up early in the morning, because they needed the bright light to work by. It was because they didn't have that electricity network or the home lighting opportunities that we have. They also needed to go to work in a brighter morning, because they didn’t have the kind of public lighting we have now. Nowadays, road conditions and cars are better, and footpaths are safer to use.”

The level of response to Foley’s research shows how keen interest in the subject is — her findings have spread across British and Irish national media after just two local radio appearances and before she has actually prepared them for publication. The particular interest right now makes perfect sense.

So grave could shortages of electricity across Europe be this winter that German unions are already recommending that businesses shut early to save energy, while many of the country’s cities are giving up on Christmas lights this year. British households may face blackouts, leading to a sales increase for domestic batteries, while Spain has introduced temperature caps for both heating and air conditioning in public buildings. Given the potential difficulties all these measures might create, giving up daylight saving might prove a relatively easy win.

That still doesn’t mean daylight saving is on the way out. An EU agreement made in 2019 to dispense with clock changes still hasn’t happened – partly due to grey areas in the union’s power structure, but mainly because its members have all had bigger fires to fight over the past few chaotic years. Against this backdrop, daylight saving has understandably slid down the list of international issues to resolve.

But as the body of evidence suggesting it is a hindrance — and one that could even have potential geopolitical effects — grows, the clock still seems to be ticking on the habit’s abolition across Europe, where Iceland, Turkey, Russia and Belarus have already given it up. It’s just a clock that seems to be ticking rather slowly.

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