The switch to winter time which will take place on the night of Saturday 29 to Sunday 30 October will save the French people an hour of sleep, but is this also synonymous with energy savings?
The French will be able to sleep an extra hour on the night of this Saturday 29 to Sunday 30 October. But will they also be able to save money by switching to winter time? Primary function of the time change, this mechanism enables energy savings to be made. In fact, in the 1970s, to avoid consuming too much electricity in the midst of the oil crisis, an extra hour of sunshine in the evening allowed French households to consume less. Is it the same for the transition to winter time?
Not so sure if we take into account the data of our British neighbors who change time at the same time as France. Professor Aoife Foley, a clean energy expert at Queen’s University Belfast unveiled the results of her study at Guardian, the results are against a time change in winter. According to the expert “by simply giving up switching from summer time to winter time in October, we would save energy because it is lighter in the evening in winter. We would thus reduce the demand for commercial and residential electricity when people leave work, which means that less lighting and heating is needed,” she told the British newspaper. The study being British, it is a simple indicator on the French scale.
The tempered advantages of the time change
In study dating from 2010, the Agency for Ecological Transition (Ademe) evaluated the savings made by switching to summer time, according to the agency the CO2 savings are “modest”. For lighting, the study mentioned that in 2009 “these savings represented around 440 gigawatt hours (GWh), or the equivalent of the lighting consumption of around 800,000 households. Thanks to these savings on lighting, 44,000 tonnes of CO2 have thus been avoided”, i.e. approximately 0.07% of annual electricity consumption in France. Ademe also gave an estimate of the energy savings on electricity planned for 2030 thanks to the transition to summer time. The Agency is counting on declining savings with 340 GWh saved in France in 2030. Among the justifications put forward for this drop in energy savings, several experts explain that the use by the population of low-consumption, less energy-consuming light bulbs , is one of the factors but also the reduction in the duration of lighting in cities and some of certain buildings at night.
For Anna Creti, Professor of Economics at the University of Paris Dauphine-PSL, Scientific Director of the Climate Economics Chair, these energy savings decrease over time. At the microphone of France infothe professor declared in March 2022 that in France the energy gain allowed thanks to the time change “is more or less 1% of the overall electricity consumption”.
Energy savings also vary by region. A 2017 European Commission study revealed that energy savings vary between 0.5% to more than 2.5% within the European Union, stating that “the effect of summer time is more important in the southern regions than in the northern regions”.