Daylight Saving Dramas

I suspect it is not the cooking per se but doing more things by natural light saves power as lighting and heating/cooling is turned off an hour earlier when people go to bed.

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That’s not easy to answer unless you lived in Tassie in 1967.

You might look to:

TA Newman - Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of …, 1984 - eprints.utas.edu.au
Tasmania pioneered Australia’s post-World War Two usage of daylight saving by unilaterally adopting it in the summer of 1967 for a six-month period as an emergency energy saving measure.

It may answer your point on history. I too doubt there are that many genuine business impacts, except for those living either side of the line. I appreciate the thinking of @draughtrider

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Times have changed. These days, far more houses are air-conditioned. Summer days are getting warmer and staying that way longer. Trying to sleep - particularly trying to get children to sleep - is difficult when the house is uncomfortably warm. I wonder how daylight saving impacts energy use under present-day conditions.

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How we use energy now is certainly different compared with 50 years prior.

The obvious is it depends on where you live, what sort of house you have and life style and family circumstances.

Short of a survey for hotter parts, many households where there is DS see families at home after school or work an hour earlier than without DS. You could draw your own conclussions re air conditioning use in that instance.

For other locations it may make little difference in usage, although shifting the NSW and VIC peak demand an hour relative to Qld may spread the evening peak loading a little.

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Quite right.

Also, it is necessary to take into account the longitude of where you live. The further East in a time zone, the earlier the sun rises and the sun sets.

To illustrate the time differences when the sun is up, have a look at a map of the East coast around the Qld/NSW border. The most Easterly point of Australia, Byron Bay, is at longitude 153.6 degrees, Gold Coast is very close at 153.4. Out the west of Queensland, as an example Mount Isa is at 139.7 degrees.

The time difference between each degree of longitude is 4 minutes. So the Gold Coast would have sunrise/sunset roughly (13.7 degrees x 4 minutes =) 54.8 minutes earlier than Mount Isa.

Without DST, you can appreciate how much earlier in the day the sun rises/sets (according to Google) in the east of Qld (5:11am/5:54pm). compared to the west of Qld (6:12am/6:44pm). With DST SE Qld would almost be in sync with western Queensland (and NSW, because they’re on DST) in terms of what time of the day the daylight occurs.

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I just wish it started in November and ended in March not 6 months we have now

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It’s interesting how accustomed we have become to what the clock tells us as being immutable (as contradictory as that sounds) and how we need to start and finish what we do according to a value rather than a sun based time of day that might in another reality make sense - yet where DST is inflicted on the masses, we happily change the otherwise immutable value of the clock so it roughly makes all our other rather arbitrary start and finish times make sense, rather than changing those start and finish times (work, school, etc). Yet in many places, we already have adjusted start and finish times because it makes more sense.

Perhaps everything in Zulu time would work better … with us all just becoming accustomed to our local start and finish times, without getting hung up on calling them time-zones …

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When you are no longer in business it is easy to abandon the tyranny of the clock. You work during daylight, eat when you are hungry and forget which day of the week it is because the hogs need to be slopped even on Sundays and Public Holidays.

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