New study confirms: changing time in summer saves electricity

Switching to summer time saves energy – even today. This is according to a new study by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa). The reason for this is not the lamps, but the air conditioning.

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

In the study, based on data from several office buildings in 15 U.S. cities, an office building’s cooling energy could be reduced by nearly six percent by switching to daylight saving time. However, due to the early start of work in the morning, up to 4.4 percent more heating energy was used. However, since much more energy is consumed for cooling than for heating in summer, the time change has a positive impact on the energy balance of a building in general

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”.

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. (aeg/sda)