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Mar 9, 2007 10:30 am US/Central
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Good Question: Why Are We Changing Time?
by Ben Tracy
(WCCO)
This year, daylight-saving time begins on Sunday, three weeks earlier than last year and will last a week later into the fall. The time change may mess up some electronics, the ride to school will be darker and the airlines were not happy about changing flight schedules.
So why are we doing it?
It is a change legislated by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Congress gets to decide what time it is and said it is going to save us energy.
"I think the public awareness is a much more important thing," said Timothy Rose who works for Fresh Energy, a non-profit group that advocates for clean energy. "The rationale is that if you extend daylight hours, you will reduce the amount of electricity that is used in the evening hours for lights."
"Will these four weeks really make a difference when it comes to energy savings?" WCCO-TV's Ben Tracy asked Rose.
"For the individual family, probably very little," Rose said. "As a state, probably more. As a nation, more."
The congressman advocating the change said it could save $320 million in electricity costs and avoid the need to build three new power plants, but we don't actually get more daylight.
We just shift it, so electricity use in the morning will likely increase.
"So what this really is an opportunity for us to look at energy consumption and energy efficiency," Rose said. "It really shouldn't be about daylight-saving time. It should be about energy savings time."
The Energy Secretary plans to tell Congress how this year's switch goes. If lawmakers don't like it, we could go back to the old rules someday.
Disagreements about daylight-saving time aren't new. In 1965, Minneapolis and St. Paul couldn't agree on when it should start, so the Twin Cities sat an hour apart and a lot of schedules got mixed up.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)