Bangladesh Turns 11 p.m. Into Midnight

One hour removed for energy efficiency

Bangladesh was facing a serious electricity shortage in 2009.

The government looked for ways to reduce evening power demand, and one proposal was something the country had never previously tried:

Daylight Saving Time.

The idea was familiar elsewhere. Move official time forward, shift people's activities toward available daylight and reduce some evening demand for artificial lighting and electricity.

Bangladesh decided to begin on Friday, 19 June.

But the chosen transition time gave the change an especially neat WTF quality.

At 11:00 p.m., clocks were advanced directly by one hour.

So:

10:59 p.m.

became

12:00 midnight.

The final hour of Friday simply disappeared from civil time.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina marked the change with a commemorative stamp, while Bangladesh Television carried live coverage of clocks being adjusted in Dhaka.

The government hoped the change would reduce pressure during peak evening demand. Contemporary Bangladeshi reporting cited an Energy Ministry estimate of roughly 200 megawatts in potential savings during the evening peak.

Businesses, schools and offices generally kept their official opening hours unchanged.

The clock changed around them.

That meant people effectively began their activities one solar hour earlier while still reading the same scheduled time on the wall.

Bangladesh's experiment did not become permanent.

The country observed DST only in 2009 and ended it at the end of that year.

But for one Friday night, the national solution to an energy problem involved removing sixty minutes from Friday.