Day Light Savings Time... And Energy Efficiency... and Sustainability

While you are are staying up late, thinking about saving time and saving money...
Give a look at the past blog post here on EE and DST and California's discussion about Daylight Savings Time.

This is the heart of sustainability: things that we can do right here, right now, to move toward more sustainability. Some of them might be only small changes, like adjusting the clock to start earlier in the day, when sun gets up earlier...

One other idea is to move to LED lights. If 10% of our utilites comes from lighting, and LEDs will save us about 70%.... That cuts about 7% of our electric production. if utilities are about 2.5% of our $16.15T GDP... That's $28B per year. Every year. As a perpetuity at 5% interest that would be a half trillion dollars ($565B). These are rough numbers, but the concept holds up nicely.

GDP	Factor	$16.15	T
$ Energy	2.50%	$   403.75	B
% Lights	10%	$     40.38	B
Savings	70%	$     28.26	B
Perpetuity	5%	$   565.25	B