Is Daylight Saving Time worth it in tourist regions?

Abstract

[eng] We investigate the impact of Daylight Saving Time (DST) on electricity demand in the Balearic Islands (Spain), a region characterized by a large tourism industry, and where tourists outnumber residents during the peak season. Using daily data from 2007 to 2017 and deploying a time series model as well as a double/debiased machine learning model, we estimate that DST implementation results in a small positive increase of electricity consumption, although in several cases this effect is not statistically significant. Omitting from the model a variable that measures the number of people present on the islands would lead to an overestimation of the DST effect on electricity consumption.