Daylight saving time 2023 from Sunday 26 March, this year we will save 220 million euros - Corriere.it

Daylight saving time returns on Sunday 26 March, when at two in the morning it will be necessary to move the hands forward by sixty minutes, i.e. at three o'clock in the morning (On the other hand, you don't have to do anything with smartphones, which will automatically adjust). We will therefore all sleep an hour less, but on the other hand we will have longer days and more natural light to exploit (standard time will return on October 29, 2023). Daylight saving time was born precisely to promote energy savings in times of crisis and Italy adopted it for the first time during the First World War (in May 1916, with interruptions between 1921 and 1939 and then between 1948 and 1965). The dramatic reasons that led to that decision are now a distant memory, but even today, in times of necessary energy saving, daylight saving time performs its function admirably.

From 2004 to 2022, 10.9 billion kWh were saved

And the confirmation comes from the estimates of Terna, the company that manages the national transmission grid, which calculates that summer time will be in effect for the seven months a saving for Italy of around 220 million euros. This is thanks to a lower consumption of electricity equal to about 410 million kWh which will generate, among other things, a significant environmental benefit, quantifiable in the reduction of about 200 thousand tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. The economic benefit estimated by Terna calculated considering that the cost of the average kWh for the "typical domestic customer in protection" (according to Arera data), currently equal to around 53 eurocents gross of taxes. The approximately 410 million kWh of lower electricity consumption is equivalent to the average annual requirement of over 150,000 families. From 2004 to 2022according to the analysis of the company led by Stefano Donnarumma, the lower electricity consumption for Italy due to summer time was around 10.9 billion kWh overall and has involved, in economic terms, savings for citizens of around 2 billion euro.

The request for abolition

For a long time Europe wondered whether it wasn't the case to abolish the time change and choose legal or solar time for the whole year. In the spring of 2019, the European Parliament finally approved the legislative resolution on the abolition of summer time with 410 votes in favor, 192 against and 51 abstentions. The year before, between 4 and 16 August, the European Commission had proposed to put an end to seasonal time changes and with an online public consultation had asked European citizens to choose, in the event of the abolition of the time change, whether prefer to keep standard time or summer time forever. There were 4.6 million responses, i.e. only 1% of the over 447 million inhabitants that the EU had in that year participated in the consultation. Despite this, it remains the highest number of participants ever registered for a public consultation. The Italians had almost completely deserted it (because the majority knew nothing about it and because the informed minority was not particularly touched by the subject). Finally, the European Commission had proposed to put an end to the seasonal change of time in Europe, leaving it up to the Member States to decide once and for all whether to apply summer or winter time permanently.

What is daylight saving time

As we all know, summer time is the convention of moving the hands of the clocks of a state forward by one hour to better exploit the sun's radiation during the summer period and therefore save in terms of electricity. And if the countries of Northern Europe (Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania, etc) have always been the most sensitive to the subject, due to the fact that, being close to the North Pole, they do not benefit from natural light with the change of now, the theme of "summer time" has become interesting over time for us Italians too.

The request of the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine

Last autumn, in the midst of the high-energy emergency, to counter the soaring electricity and gas bills and find a way to help families and businesses save money, the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine (Sima) had asked the government to establish summer time throughout the year, thus abandoning the now usual "summer time/winter time" transition. Sima's request was not far-fetched: in the 7 months of 2022 in which summer time was in force, therefore before the surge in prices, according to what Terna calculated, 420 million kilowatt hours of electricity had been saved, the equivalent of the average annual requirement of about 150,000 families. Not to mention the 200,000 tons of CO2 not released into the atmosphere. The savings had been estimated at over 190 million euros.