Save light, lose energy?

PROPONENTS of daylight saving who claim that extended daylight hours cut energy consumption levels have been dealt a blow by a recent study.
The report, Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence From an Australian Experiment, looked at what happened to energy usage when Victoria extended its DST by two months to facilitate the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
Ryan Kellogg and Hendrik Wolff of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley compared Victoria's half-hourly electricity consumption, prices and weather conditions with those of South Australia, which did not extend DST over this period.
Supporters of DST often argue that longer daylight hours in the evening mean that less power is used for lighting. However, the US researchers found that the decrease in evening electricity demand and the increase in morning demand "almost perfectly balanced each other out".
There was even a slight but statistically negligible increase in overall usage.

Hah! I still think the best answer is that daylight savings 'makes the curtains fade faster', though I am increasingly of the opinion that daylight saving time means people actually fade in energy and enthusiasm the longer this 'saving of daylight' goes on. I know that getting up in the dark (though I will admit rediscovering sunrise has been lovely) I find to be less disturbing that trying to relate to watching the early news while it's still too hot to be in the house ... and watching the TV from the patio through the fly-screen is somehow inhibiting to the proper expressions of appreciation of what is being shown.