Daylight saving time (DST)—also summer time in British English is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn. Modern DST was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson. Many countries have used it since then; details vary by location and change occasionally.
DST's potential to save energy comes primarily from its effects on residential lighting, which consumes about 3.5% of electricity in the U.S. and Canada. Delaying the nominal time of sunset and sunrise reduces the use of artificial light in the evening and increases it in the morning. As Franklin's 1784 satire pointed out, lighting costs are reduced if the evening reduction outweighs the morning increase, as in high-latitude summer when most people wake up well after sunrise. An early goal of DST was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, formerly a primary use of electricity. Although energy conservation remains an important goal,energy usage patterns have greatly changed since then, and recent research is limited and reports contradictory results. Electricity use is greatly affected by geography, climate, and economics, making it hard to generalize from single studies.
No comments:
Post a Comment