As detailed in this CNET News Feature (and as most technically-minded people could have guessed), there have been several minor to middle-of-the-road problems with the most recent daylight saving change.

I know that I’m not the only one that feels like Congress is taking a somewhat-uneducated stab at this - toying with something that has pretty significant repercussions for many of us without having a real idea of the benefits.

It was covered once in April by ArsTechnica and they had many of the same complaints I have had after reviewing both sides of the change.

All of this was to try and save energy - and realistically also to save cost (and of course make money by having people stay out and shop later, and whatever other excuse they can come up with).

Unfortunately, most reports indicate that any energy savings were no greater than statistical anomaly. The Ars Technica article has this quote from two major power companies:

Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: “We haven’t seen any measurable impact.” New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: “no impact” on their business.

Likewise, this article from the California Energy Commission has a similar comment:

The question remains, however, whether the earlier DST will save additional energy. The California Energy Commission’s Demand Analysis Office, has published a report titled The Effect of Early Daylight Saving Time on California Electricity Consumption: A Statistical Analysis, Commission publication # CEC-200-2007-004, published May 2007.

It concludes that, “The extension of Daylight Saving Time (DST) to March 2007 had little or no effect on energy consumption in California, according to a statistical analysis. The most likely approximation is a 0.2% decrease during these three weeks. Given the natural variation in consumption, however, the margin of electricity use change associated with early DST could have been one and a half percent of increase or decrease without such effects showing up statistically. Formally, weather- and lighting-corrected savings from DST were estimated at 0.18% with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 1.5% savings to a 1.4% increase.”

What scares me is the fact that congress is so far removed from reality, they probably aren’t even remotely aware of the cost in collateral damage. Think of all of the money from all of the businesses that had to update static time-zone code to account for this. Think of all of the stand-alone devices (like clock radios) that are designed to be user-friendly by updating time-zones every year, but now are now permanently wrong because they have the wrong logic programmed. As an example in obscurity, my company’s Cisco IP phones have been wrong all morning. They were able to fix them via a simple firmware push, but that example cost Cisco money, confused a few people in my office, and cost my business money in having to do special maintenance on the phone system.

Even still, Congress implemented this change and didn’t get what they want, so now they’ll leave it alone, right? Don’t be so sure - after all, this change they implemented was really a compromise - from the California Energy Commission:

The original House bill would have added two full months, one in the spring and another in the fall. According to some U.S. senators, farmers complained that a two-month extension could adversely affect livestock, and airline officials said it would have complicated scheduling of international flights. So, a compromise was worked out to start DST on the second Sunday in March and end the first Sunday in November.

So, long-story short, Congress may decide that to get the full effect we need to do this all over again, this time adding the month on the end. If you’re the politically active type, you might want to attempt to convince your congressman that they should be against any further changes to daylight savings (unless it involves removing the concept from North America all together!)