If the idea of daylight time is to save energy on home lighting, then its time may be up. There was never any conclusive data to show that daylight time saves energy on lighting in the first place, but a likely guess is that it saved about 1 percent. Why so little? The gains from the lights people don’t use at home in the early evening are mostly negated by the losses from lights people must turn on when they get up in the morning in the dark because of daylight time.
And now home lighting uses a lot less power to begin with. When you replace a 60 watt light bulb with a 10.5 watt bulb, that is a savings of not 1 percent, but 82.5 percent. Put simply, LED lighting solves the problem that daylight time was meant to solve, and it does it 80 times better. At this point, it is fair to describe daylight time as a bizarre policy based on a superstition. After we repeal it, we will be hard pressed to explain why we ever had it in the first place.
