Daylight saving time saves electricity

class=”sc-3778e872-0 gWjAEa”>

For many it is a torment: one hour forward, one hour back. Every year. The back and forth between winter and summer time always causes discussions. In politics, but also in society.

A new study from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) now shows that switching to summer time saves electricity. The reason for this is the air conditioning. And not the lamps. The artificial light was the original reason for the introduction of the time change.

Going home earlier saves energy

Due to the time change in the summer, employees leave the office an hour earlier in the afternoon. Because most of the cooling capacity takes place in the late afternoon, energy can be saved. Empa writes this in a statement this week.

To test the hypothesis, the researchers simulated the heating and cooling energy used with and without daylight saving time for different climate regions based on data from several office buildings in 15 US cities. Not only the current climate, but also future climate scenarios up to 2050 have been included in order to include the influence of climate change.

The result should satisfy supporters of summer time and environmentalists: with the switch to summer time, the cooling energy of an office building can be reduced by almost six percent.

The cooling can be switched off in the empty office

However, due to the early start of work in the morning, up to 4.4 percent more heating energy was used. However, since in summer much more energy is consumed for cooling than for heating, the time change has a positive effect on the energy balance of a building as a whole.

The prerequisite for such savings is that the cooling can be turned off or turned off completely when the office is empty. Given that buildings are becoming increasingly intelligent, this will be relatively easy to achieve in the future, according to the researchers.

Summer time contributes to climate protection

Across the various climate scenarios and climate zones, total energy savings amounted to a maximum of 3 percent. The results were recently published in the journal “Environmental Research Letters”.

“Our research shows that the time change can contribute to climate protection. In the discussion about the abolition of summer time, political decision-makers should therefore not only consider the energy savings of artificial lighting, but also the overall impact on the energy balance of office buildings,” says study author Sven Eggimann. (okay)

Source:Blick