Location matters: daylight saving time and electricity use

Blake Shaffer

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The primary rationale for daylight saving time (DST) has long been energy savings. Whether it achieves this goal, however, remains a subject of debate. Recent studies, examining only one location at a time, have shown DST to increase, decrease or leave overall energy use unchanged. Rather than concluding the effect is ambiguous, this paper is the first to test for heterogeneous regional effects based on differences in (natural) sun times and (societal) waking hours. Using a rich hourly data set and quasi -experimental methods applied across Canadian provinces, this paper rationalizes the differing results, finding region-specific effects consistent with differences in sun times and waking hours. DST increases electricity use in regions with late sunrises and early waking hours.

Keywords: Daylight saving time; electricity demand; regional effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C54 Q4 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84053/1/MPRA_paper_84053.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:84053

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).