Summer may be playing extra time, but it’s time. And France will have to go to the winter one on Sunday. At three o’clock in the morning on the night of Saturday to Sunday, it will be two o’clock.
It will therefore be necessary to think of setting back clocks and other alarm clocks by sixty minutes, which will allow everyone to benefit from an additional hour of sleep. Afterwards, bonus for early risers: they will benefit from a little more light in the early morning with, in return, a night which will fall earlier at the end of the day.
Particularity of the system: it does not concern overseas territories which never change time (with the exception of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon which is based on neighboring Canada). Indeed, most of them are in latitudes where the variations in sunshine are low throughout the year, unlike Europe.
This time change, introduced for the first time in 1916 before being abandoned in 1944, was reintroduced by a decree in September 1975. It was intended to be temporary and aimed to limit energy consumption in the midst of the oil crisis. .
Is winter time really beneficial?
With the return of the issue of energy resources in a burning way due to the war in Ukraine and the multiplication of calls for energy sobriety, the transition to winter time could appear beneficial. But is it really? In fact, the time change has only a minimal effect on energy consumption. Thus, in 2009, according to the Ecological Transition Agency (Ademe), the switch from winter time to summer time led to lighting gains of around 440 GWh, or 0.07% of total electricity consumption. Lighting using partly carbon-based means of electricity production, these savings represented a gain of around 50,000 tonnes of CO2.
But since then, this effect has tended to diminish due to the increased performance of lighting systems (low-consumption bulbs and LEDs). In 2018, this drop was only 351 GWh. By 2030, energy savings in lighting are estimated at 258 GWh by Ademe.
Knowing that in addition the majority of household energy consumption comes from heating and not from lighting, the evidence of energy savings therefore remains to be demonstrated. Worse, a recent British study claims that scrapping the clock change in October would save £400 (460 euros) per household per year, as it would be light longer in the evening, reducing demand during point.
Worldwide, several countries, such as Argentina, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia or Armenia have already decided to abandon seasonal time changes.