An extra hour of sleep and real savings? Next weekend, we will save an hour on the night of Saturday October 29 to Sunday October 30 since at 3 o’clock it will be 2 o’clock. This time change introduced at the end of the 1970s should make it possible to save energy. And it is useful according to Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the internal market. “Anything that saves energy is good and therefore I support, in any case during this period, the fact that we must maintain this small effort that we must make”, he said on LCI, explaining that even today, this measure makes it possible to save energy. A rather true statement, but to qualify.
If the change of time makes it possible to make savings, they are today much more “modest”, according to the Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), which has studied the impact of the time change. The main gain is related to lighting. For example, in 2009, the time change enabled savings of almost 450 GWh, which is the equivalent of the lighting consumption of around 800,000 households.
A significant saving but which will drop significantly, by at least 25%, in the coming years because lighting, whether in homes or in the street, is less and less energy-consuming, in particular thanks to low-consumption light bulbs . And not to mention that this winter many municipalities have also chosen to turn off their public lighting for part of the night.
With regard to heating or air conditioning in summer, the change of time does not significantly modify consumption, explains Ademe. This is also what other studies abroad say. For example, the European Commission estimates that earnings are “marginal”. Brussels has calculated that the time change saves between 0.5 and 2.5% of the total energy consumption of European countries.
Moreover, the European Commission wanted to abolish the time change. In 2019, a draft directive was presented. The text was to be adopted at the end of 2020, except that in the meantime, there was the Covid which upset the agenda. Today, with the war in Ukraine, the end of the time change is no longer a priority, even if more and more countries in the world, such as Turkey, Iceland or Russia, have decided in recent years of not changing clocks.
How can everyone be better informed?
Participate in the consultation initiated as part of the European project De facto on the Make.org platform. Franceinfo is the partner