Iowans will have to make their clocks "spring ahead" sooner this year as Sunday will mark the start of daylight-saving time. That’s three weeks early and it’ll last a week longer into November. Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says the move is due to the 2005 Energy Policy Act.
Grassley says "There was a provision in the bill for conservation. Things that were talked about most was tax credits, like for fuel cell cars, energy efficient home appliances." He says the experts claim daylight-saving time not only saves daylight, it can help save energy — and money.
Grassley says "The Energy Committee felt that one way to save about one-percent of the energy that we use in the United States would be to have longer periods of daylight-saving time and that was put in the bill." He says the daylight-saving time issue was an "obscure" part of the larger Energy Bill, which contained many important items for Iowa.
Grassley says "Most of the time we talked about revitalizing the nuclear industry, starting a tax credit for biodiesel like we have for ethanol, extending the ethanol tax credit, putting forth the seven-and-a-half billion gallon mandate of oil companies using that much ethanol." He says it also contained tax credits for biomass and wind energy.
Proposed by Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, daylight-saving time was first mandated in the U.S. in 1918 during World War One but was revoked in 1919 because people hated it. It was revived in 1942 during World War Two and has been revised several times since then.