Last weekend, we had to set our clocks forward one hour, thus starting this year’s summer time. The most positive result of this is that it is much longer light in the evenings, and the transition made the question relevant again, what is the need for this national adventure?

Winter and summer time were introduced during the First World War, in 1916, in order to use less artificial lighting, i.e. to save energy. At the time, however, this was purely an economic issue, but nowadays, in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, it is worth considering whether or not to keep changing the clocks.

The question is also topical because the European Commission adopted a proposal in 2018, according to which the clock change would have been abolished a year later. However, since the set deadline turned out to be quite tight, the decision was postponed to 2021. The emergence of covid and last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine proved to be a more important issue, so the topic is not on the agenda for the time being, and, according to Euronews, there is currently not enough support for canceling the clock change in the European Commission.

The big question is how much energy a country saves by using winter and summer time. The US Department of Transportation conducted a study back in 1975, which concluded that by introducing daylight saving time, around 1 percent of the country’s energy consumption could be saved. In New Zealand, energy providers investigated the issue and found that energy use drops by approximately 3.5 percent during daylight saving time.

In a recent study, the Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) examined the energy demand not only for artificial lighting, but also for the cooling and heating of buildings in connection with the clock change, writes the Science Daily.

The results are convincing: they examined the energy consumption of office buildings located in regions with different climates, in a total of 15 American cities. During the study, the simulations were run not only under the current climate conditions, but also under the climate conditions expected in 2050.

According to the results, the introduction of summer time can reduce the amount of energy spent on cooling office buildings by up to 6 percent. They also pointed out that due to the earlier start of work, the energy spent on heating the buildings increased by 4.4 percent, however, the researchers emphasized that much more energy must be used for the former, i.e. for cooling, than for heating, so the net result is still energy savings.

The energy demand of the buildings located in different time zones was different due to the climate conditions, however, the change of the clocks still brought savings of about 3 percent.

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