European Parliament set to end EU-wide daylight savings

It depends on the market design of course, but generally, if too many energy providers did not match their consumption with generation (or bought power), that could lead to power outages.

Concerning the 'late fees': if your consumption exceeds your production, you pay what is called balancing energy. Essentially, you have to buy the energy for a price that is set by the transmission system operator depending on the total imbalance in the grid. In some cases, this might actually be beneficial to the energy provider as the balancing energy is sometimes cheaper than the prices you get on the sport market close to gate closure.

Working in the same sector, I can confirm this. We try to offer pretty much any half-way reasonable interface to our clients for that exact reason, be it spreadsheets or csv via mail or SFTP, REST APIs or a web interface.

yeah, it's both what you say and sales people's poor understanding of how annoying that is (and the fact that they get rewarded for closed contracts where operational costs dont matter)

Har har. That's not the problem, the problem is for everyone else who can't "just come an hour later" and especially for teenagers who will have to suffer even earlier school times for the entire year. From all I know, having winter time year-round will be objectively worse in aggregate, so I want to not have that happen. I already participated in the initial EU questionnaire and voted for repealing DST, but I don't want to end up on summer time all year.

Unless you desire to get up at 4:30 in the morning, you're going to have to invest in some curtains either way. At that point, the exact time of sunrise doesn't really matter.

According to someone farther down in the comments here, India has no DST and simply starts school later in the winter. I guess that's just too hard for America?

DST causes trauma for people with bipolar disorder, heart attacks go up, etc. Also, on a selfish note, it's irritating to program around.

DST is a legislative solution to the problem of getting everyone to change scheduling. So why not use legislation to get those school boards to change scheduling directly?

Maybe legislation should focus on that problem makeing sure that a) people who could have this autonomy can get it and b) where fixed schedules are unavoidable they get shifted accordingly instead of playing with the clock.

Ah that old trick

It's also a problem for software engineers in the UK, for whom 6 months of the year utc and local time are the same, resulting in people not knowing the difference. In the rest of the world it's bleedin obvious.

A downside to inventing time I guess ;)

British Standard Time existed all year (~50 years ago) but British Summer Time is defined as "the period beginning at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in March and ending at one o'clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in October."

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2002/262/article/2/made

The "S" stands for "Summer", and I strongly recommend reading things like https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pr... and http://creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-programmer... before confidently making statements on this subject.

Do you have any credible sources that say wildlife is affected in any way by daylight savings?

Afternoon.

It affects their decisions in some nominal capacity, but it is still up to the states and territories. Federal laws don't have the authority to supersede local laws whenever they want.

"As of 2014, the following states and territories are not observing DST: Arizona, Hawaii, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.[7]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time_in_the_Un...

The ‘savings’ refers to the energy saved, not the daylight.

> The number of seats in the EP is proportional to the population

Not quite, larger countries have fewer MEPs per capita[0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degressive_proportionality

You are confusing the Parliament and the Council.

Reason being that people picked this up very quickly and for once this poll even made it into mass media before it was over. I think this only shows how much changing clocks annoys people; they hear about a poll, they go vote.

AIUI in most other countries this initial pick-up and publicity just didn't happen.

Edit: I think I misunderstood your comment. I thought you meant Greece and Cyprus prefer to keep summer time for ever. Whereas you probably meant that Greece and Cyprus wanted to keep changing the clocks.

Anyway I leave my initial comment below.

I think you read that wrong. You should look at section 3.5.

"The highest share of respondents in favour of “permanent summertime” is in Portugal (79%), Cyprus (73%) and Poland (72%)."

Let me invite you to the arctic circle, where the sun don't set or rise in large parts of the year.

No one is forcing you to wake up at any particular time. If you want to wake up when the sun rises, you can do that. You don't need to control everyone's clock to do that.

> I say it's natural to wake up when the sun raises, you say it's natural to stick to the same hour all year long.

Either of those is fine. What's not fine is making everyone change their clocks twice a year so that those options are more similar to each other.

Could be! Permanent summer time has my preference but I honestly don't mind at all if I have light when I get up, but a lot of people seem to want that.

Also: permanent darkness rush hours. Nice.

You are neglecting public health concerns. People’s sleep tends to be disrupted when they have to wake up long before sunrise. Sleep is important for the population, more important then afternoon sunshine, I would say.

I actually like this idea. Mostly because it means that my Elite Dangerous time will be the same as my "local time".

When business hours are off by one hour, there is one hour less to communicate with your neighboring countries during business hours.

If you had an eight-hour work day, a one-hour time offset from a neighboring country would mean you overlap with them for seven hours, and they overlap with you for seven hours. One of you loses an hour off the beginning of your day, and the other loses an hour off the end, but that does not add up to a loss of two hours.

This is especially obvious when you have an eight hour workday with an eight hour time zone offset. That does not mean you have sixteen hours less communication time.

> The reality is that north-west EU will do whatever Germany does. Germany wants GMT+2. That means that all countries west of Germany that follow Germany will have post 10 o'clock sunrises in winter, 2 hours after people get out to bring their kids to school & go to work.

As a french I don't see the problem with that, I'd much rather have more sunlight in the evening when I can actually go out and do stuff

re: 1 and 2. Yet lots of businesses in US states communicate with other businesses (and company locations) in different time zones including those in adjacent states in some cases. To say nothing of other countries. Dealing with timezone differences is routine for many people (and fortunately something that computers mostly handle pretty well except when you forget to provide them with timezone info).

There's a good argument for not proliferating timezones beyond a certain point. But, given they exist for good reason, you're always going to have lines that people need to communicate (and even commute) over.

Just spitballing, but I take it you don't participate in many multi-TZ meetings.

1. That's a non problem. If you're in meetings 8h/day the last of your worries would be TZ. Plus, such a time zone difference already exists today between e.g. France and the UK, Portugal and Spain, or for that matter within the US and other countries, and even within US states themselves (see AZ).

2. No it doesn't. What's most problematic when setting appointments actually is when daylight savings changes times. During the switch your regularly scheduled meetings may get messed up, times that worked for an entire remote team might no longer work for a week or two, and mishaps on new meeting schedules are all over the place. See e.g. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4?t=230 to get a sense of how nutty it can get.

3. 4. I'm failing to see how using daylight savings or not makes any difference.

>1. Business hours must be kept in sync with the important countries next to them. This is important for communications between companies.

I'm going to echo another responder here: this is total BS. Here in America, it's completely routine for companies on opposite coasts to do business with each other, and there's a 3-hour time difference year-round. If we can handle that, surely Europeans can handle a 1-hour difference.

There are also union laws that mandate overtime pay off hours. These hours are often defined to be out side of 8:00-17:00, incentivizing businesses to keep open during these hours.

For a bunch of countries in northern Europe you don't even get to make the choice during winter. All trips to/from work or school are done in the dark, because there's just not enough daylight to go around.

This site does a good job of explaining:

https://qntm.org/abolish

For me the biggest headache would be the date changing in th middle of the day.

If “daylight savings” time is so great, why not keep it all year round? Why change at all?

>In California, daylight savings actually makes sense, it's a noticeable boost of daylight for your office commute in the winter.

So the plan is that instead of people working hours which suit and know about it we agree on a weird collective lie and get everyone to perform the clock-adjusting ritual

Daylight saving time doesn't apply to the winter though.

Winter time is standard time, and DST is in effect during the summer months to better make use of the extra light available during summer by winding clocks an hour forward. The idea being that you get an extra hour of sun in the afternoon.

I agree. I see why countries in northern Europe have little use for daylight savings: they have darkness in the morning in winter and sun well before everybody's awake in summer whenever they use daylight savings or not. In southern Europe it's different (I live there), especially because those countries tend to center their day not around noon but to later hours: lunch starting between 13:00/15:00 and dinner between 21:00/23:00. Spain basically lives with a double summer time. Italy has a gradient between North (earlier, 1 PM) and South (later). I don't live particularly in the south but if I have to choose I'll pick summer time for all the year, and maybe double of it. Sun at 6 AM is wasted, darkness at 7 PM is depressing.

We could end up with two horizontal time zones. UTC+1 in the north and UTC+2 in the south.

By the way, the few people from my country that voted in that poll were keen about keeping daylight savings.

> In California, daylight savings actually makes sense, it's a noticeable boost of daylight for your office commute in the winter.

Winter is in standard time, so DST has no effect on it. (Also, the standard time evening commute in CA is in darkness, and wouldn't be if it was in DST, so even if you are comparing the status quo against permanent DST rather than permanent standard time, that's still wrong.)

DST—“Summer Time”—maximizes post-9-5-working-hours daylight time (to promote shopping and other commercial and recreational activity) in summer, not commute-convenient daylight time in winter.

Seems like they needed a latitude based timezones on top of longtitude timezones... A grid based timezone system.

Sounds like it would pay for a lot of developers careers... And a nightmare.

I grew up at 59 degrees north latitude. Daylight savings was pointless. Wintertime I'd go school in the dark (8am) and go home in the twilight (2pm). Lunch time was bright though...

My parents grew up at 70 degrees north, where daylight saving is totally useless as there is no daylight in the middle of winter.

I now live at 51 degrees latitude and my kids go to school in daylight as school start an hour later here. For a few weeks in the winter daylight saving does make a tiny difference for their morning but not afternoon.

But as an adult daylight saving always went the wrong way as it means evenings get darker sooner. I don't care if I commute in the dark in the morning, but I do prefer to do things after school/work in some daylight/twilight.

We have these other seasons in northern Europe, called autumn and spring.

If schools also do not switch biannually (which of course they won't) that simply does not work for families with children.

That only works with some types of work. Anything customer-facing is difficult to change. E.g. you may decide to open/close your restaurant or bakery at different times. It will probably be a very bad idea.

The point of “changing the clock” is that the clock synchronizes all alarm clocks, all contracts, all billboards, al timetables and schedules - so the change updates everything transactionally.

That's News to Me in the UK

Fair enough, but the majority of students, examinators and teachers aren’t asking for it.

I’m an examinator myself, and we have zero members on STEM educations who think their return are a good idea. We discussied it at our summit earlier this year.

I’d like to hear why you want it back. We originally removed it because it gave Danish students a major disadvantage when applying for anything internationally because people who would be straight A students, ranked a whole grade lover than their international counterparts, despite actually fulfilling the exact same course requirements.

I’ve had students where I would have liked to given them more than the top mark, because they were better than what was required. But I’d much rather give those people a top grade than give people who “only” meet the full requirements of a course a non-top grade. Because the difference might mean that a student who actually deserves an international top mark, loses out on a job or a PhD outside of Denmark. Where as the excellent student walks away with a top mark in both situations.

Thanks, I lack the experience of living in the north for more than a few weeks in summer and a couple of days in winter.

I grew up in northern Sweden. I always found that summers are so bright it doesn't matter either way.

> In winter when it's bloody dark in the morning I found it credible a time shift helps.

Winter time is standard time anyway, and wouldn't be affected by this change.

> In summer when it's 11pm and bright outsides I find it credible a time shift helps.

DST pushes the clock ahead of the sun and makes it bright longer into the night.

In the north of Italy. People in the south probably don't think about dinner at 6 PM even in jokes.

... dammit. Alright, you've won me over. I'm an idiot.

> Yes, there may be side effects of changing clocks twice per year, but how do they compare to the effects of having less light in the morning in winter or less light in the evening in summer?

In think the effects you’re mentioning are insignificant compared with having your sleep schedule disrupted twice per year. People have literally died due to it.

Getting rid of DST also simplifies business. Did you know that European countries do not switch at the same time as the US?

Daylight saving times are a clusterfuck.

Farmers that want to do "farmer things" can wake up earlier and they need to be in tune with their animals, following a circadian rhythm, so the clock on the wall rarely tells them when to wake up. The sun doesn't all of a sudden rise earlier or later.

The timezone is important when collaborating with others. Does a farmer need to do business? Not sure how that fits in the farmer things they do, but when they do business they'll surely appreciate not having to search on Google for their freaking timezone when talking with a peer from another country.

I'm not familiar with the Swiss referendum, but Brexit was a case of asking a lot of ill-informed people for their vote and then blindly doing what they said.

I don't think that was the case here; the survey just informed policy, rather than dictate it.

According to Wiki, very small:

   A 2017 meta-analysis of 44 studies found that DST leads to electricity savings of only 0.34% during the days when DST applies.[81][82] The meta-analysis furthermore found that "electricity savings are larger for countries farther away from the equator, while subtropical regions consume more electricity because of DST."[81][82] This means that DST may conserve electricity in some countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, but be wasteful in other places, such as Mexico, the southern United States, and northern Africa. The savings in electricity may also be offset by extra use of other types of energy, such as heating fuel.