Light-years apart: Energy usage by schools across the South African affluence divide
Janet A. Samuels, Sara Grobbelaar, M.J. Booysen
Abstract
South Africa’s source of energy in buildings is electricity from a struggling state utility running mainly on coal. But despite the constraints and the high cost, energy usage remains mostly unchecked and poorly managed in schools, whose attention is focused on reducing inequality in educational outcomes. School energy usages have been well studied in many countries but remain largely unexplored in South Africa. We use smart electricity meters to analyse the energy requirements of 16 schools across the country’s polarised affluence spectrum. Comparing their usage with that of schools from other countries, we find that the affluent South African schools have energy densities of 13% as much as those in North America, compared to the poor schools with a mere 5%. We observe a large difference between the daily usage profiles of poor and affluent schools: poor schools used only 40% of the energy used by affluent schools. We ascribe this disparity to constrained infrastructure investment at the poor schools. We identified lighting as a major contributor to energy usage by schools, accounting for as much as 31% of the daily in-term usage by affluent schools and 40% by poor schools, compared to 14 to 25% in developed countries. Since most schools still use fluorescent lights, substantial savings can be achieved by replacing them with efficient LED lights.