Analysis of impact of daylight time savings on energy use of buildings in Kuwait

In this paper, a detailed simulation-based analysis is conducted to assess the impact of adopting Daylight Saving Time (DST) on the electrical energy use and peak demand in Kuwait. The analysis focused on the impact of DST in the building sector since it represents 90% of electrical energy usage of Kuwait.The simulation results indicate that the adoption of DST has mixed impacts for Kuwait. While the commercial and the governmental sectors may benefit from the DST, the private residences and apartment buildings can see both their annual energy use and peak demand increase slightly by adopting DST. The overall impact of the DST implementation is rather minimal with a slight increase energy use of about 0.07% and a slight reduction in peak demand of 0.14% or about 12 MW based on 2005 electrical peak demand for Kuwait.

Research highlights► A detailed simulation-based analysis is conducted to assess the impact of adopting Daylight Saving Time (DST) on the electrical energy use and peak demand in Kuwait. ► The analysis focused on the impact of DST in the building sector since it represents 90% of electrical energy usage of Kuwait. ► It is found that while the commercial and the governmental building sectors may benefit from DST, the private residences and apartment buildings can see both their annual energy use and peak demand increase slightly by adopting DST. ► Since the residential sector represents the majority of the electrical load in Kuwait, DST adoption was found to cause slight increase in annual electrical energy use by about 0.07% and a slight reduction in electrical peak electrical demand by about 0.14%.