Terna estimates daylight saving cut Italy’s electricity use by 300 million kWh

Terna, Italy’s national electricity transmission operator, said the 2026 daylight-saving period was associated with 300 million kilowatt-hours less electricity consumption. The period began on 29 March and ended on 25 October, when clocks returned to standard time. Terna compared the estimate with a counterfactual level of consumption; the release does not present it as a direct meter of household behavior.

The company translated that lower use into more than €90 million in estimated economic savings. It also estimated that emissions were about 140,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide lower. These figures are Terna’s calculations. They do not mean that every household paid less by a known amount, nor do they establish how much of the change came from any one consumer group.

Terna said its estimate for the protected electricity market’s typical household customer averaged 31.4 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, including taxes, over the daylight-saving period. That regulated price provides context for the company’s financial estimate; it is not a statement of the exact tariff paid by every household, since customer contracts and consumption differ.

The release also gives a longer comparison: from 2004 through 2026, Terna estimates that daylight saving reduced electricity use by more than 12.3 billion kWh and saved citizens about €2.4 billion. The cumulative figures are not a forecast and are not a value for 2026 alone. The company did not break down the total by year in this announcement.

Terna’s statement arrives as Italy switches clocks back for the winter. It describes the results of the daylight schedule under the current calendar, rather than a new decision on whether the seasonal clock change should continue. The release does not quantify effects on peak demand, grid investment or individual energy bills.

The estimates should therefore be read as a system-level calculation from the transmission operator. Terna supplies the headline values and date range, while the underlying release offers limited methodological detail on the counterfactual. The results support a comparison across the named periods but do not independently establish the causal contribution of daylight saving versus weather, activity or other demand factors.

The 31.4-cent figure is a period average for the specified protected-market customer profile, not a market-wide average. Terna uses it to put the estimated system savings in monetary terms. The release does not publish a year-by-year historical series or a full counterfactual calculation, so those details cannot be independently reconstructed from this announcement alone.

Terna says the 300 million kWh is comparable to the average annual electricity requirement of about 115,000 families. That comparison illustrates the scale of the estimate; it is not a count of households whose consumption was individually reduced by that amount.