At 3 o’clock Sunday morning the clocks go back one hour as daylight saving time ends and standard time begins.
The next time daylight saving time will used again will be next year on the 30th March.
According to official records daylight saving time which started on 31 March 2013 and which gave us an extra hour of light per day has saved Italy 568,000,000 kWh – A saving of something slightly over 93 million Euro’s.
Daylight saving time (DST)— also summer time in British English— is the practice of advancing clocks during the lighter months so that evenings have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.
The modern idea of daylight saving was first proposed in 1895 by George Vernon Hudson and it was first implemented by Germany and Austria-Hungary starting on 30 April 1916. Many countries have used it at various times since then. Much of the United States used DST in the 1950s and 1960s, and DST use expanded following the 1970s energy crisis. It has been widely used in North America and Europe since then.
The practice has been both praised and criticized. Adding daylight to evenings benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but can cause problems for evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun (such as farming) or to darkness (such as drive-in theatres).
Although an early goal of DST was to reduce evening use of incandescent lighting (formerly a primary use of electricity), modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly, and research about how DST currently affects energy use is limited or contradictory.