Daylight Savings, Energy Wasting?

There's an interesting article over at WSJ today, about a study that was done when Indiana recently switched over to DST. The conclusion is that observing daylight savings time costs the people of Indiana an additional 8.6 million dollars a year in electricity costs.

WOW. Now, there's some interesting information in the article, talking about the difference between this study and the studies in the early 1970's being air conditioning, which accounts for why there was an energy savings seen back then, and not so much now. Given that we just extended DST nationally for an extra month (the reason being to save more energy and fight global warming), it's ironic that we appear to be doing the opposite.

Still, the article also observes that there may be other reasons to keep DST:

"There may also be social benefits to daylight-saving time that weren't covered in the research. When the extension of daylight-saving time was proposed by Mr. Markey, he cited studies that noted "less crime, fewer traffic fatalities, more recreation time and increased economic activity" with the extra sunlight in the evening."