Does Daylight Savings Time Save Energy? Evidence from Ontario

Nicholas Rivers

Environmental & Resource Economics, 2018, vol. 70, issue 2, No 10, 517-543

Abstract: Abstract Daylight savings time was adopted for the purposes of reducing energy consumption, but recent studies have cast some doubt on whether it still serves this purpose effectively. This study estimates the effect of daylight savings time on electricity demand in Ontario, Canada. It uses a quasi-experimental approach, by leveraging the fact that the transition to DST occurs on a different day in each year. The results suggest that daylight savings time reduces the demand for electricity by about 1.5% in Ontario. The reductions in electricity consumption is concentrated during the evening period. The reduction in electricity demand appears to persist for at least several weeks following the transition to daylight savings time.

Keywords: Daylight savings time; Energy demand; Natural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10640-017-0131-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:enreec:v:70:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s10640-017-0131-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... al/journal/10640/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10640-017-0131-x

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental & Resource Economics is currently edited by Ian J. Bateman

More articles in Environmental & Resource Economics from Springer, European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().