Electrical consumption in the Higher Education sector, during the COVID-19 shutdown

Abstract

Excessive electrical consumption within buildings is a common issue across all sectors. Each sector responds to this differently, and the Higher Education (HE) sector is no exception, where energy-intensive laboratories are prevalent in most universities. The COVID-19 crisis has meant that these laboratories have either closed or reduced their opening hours; hereby, this offers an excellent opportunity to assess how shutdown periods impact on electrical consumption. This research assesses unregulated electrical consumption within a single laboratory building, which functions as a research engineering building. An Energy-Management System (EMS) was used to collect the room-level data, primarily electrical consumption. This study found that unregulated electricity consumption typically reduced rapidly during the shutdown period with a percentage reduction of 46.61% between the week before lockdown and the week during the lockdown.