Sunday was a day that I was not particularly looking forward too knowing that I, like everybody else in the province, will be losing one hour of sleep because of good old fashion daylight savings.
As I groggily rolled out bed and changed the clock on my microwave, I realized that switching the clocks in the spring and fall could soon be a thing of the past, remembering some of our current provincial government officials are looking to scrap bi-annual system that has been in place for over 100 years.
But I asked myself “other than not feeling sleepy during the month of March…what benefits would you get from switching to a standard time?”
According to an article published by St. Albert Gazette, getting rid of daylight savings is surprisingly energy efficient. Grid numbers observed between 2000 and 2015 showed the provinces energy use goes up by 1.6 per cent during this time in March due to the time change and 0.9 per cent over the next eight months.
This pretty much means that if we were to stay on standard time like Saskatchewan we would use almost eight percent less energy every year and it adds up. According to the same article that can ad up to $50 million per in energy costs if the province were to get rid of daylight savings and switch to standard time.
Now I think this is all well and good, but personally, I think the provincial government has some bigger fish to fry, like the issues of jobless rates or environmental preservation before they should start worrying about abolishing daylight savings.
To me, it ironically seems like a waste of time if this brought forward, because if it does get removed, then we will have to decided whether or not we would adopt Central Time or Mountain Time, which would be a whole new provincial debate on its own–for the record I am on team Mountain.
Not only that but I like the super long summer days here, because lets face it we get two months of summer every year and who doesn’t enjoy getting to walk around at 10 p.m. with a bit of daylight still on the horizon?
I say lets keep daylight savings because if your only argument is that it is energy efficient you should maybe go the faster and equally efficient route of buying LEDs.
