Our school is taking bold steps toward a greener future by embracing sustainability. We have installed solar panels to support a percentage of the school’s power to harness clean, renewable energy and reduce our carbon footprint. Over the last year, the 200 kWp plant has produced 267906 KWh of PV energy, reducing our dependency on the grid by more than 20%.
The CO2 offset amounts to 264 622kg of CO2, the equivalent of removing 57 passenger vehicles from the road for an entire year or 112 round-trip flights from New York to London! The school is currently negotiating the purchase of the plant from the current investor, which will result in energy cost savings of +R450 000 for 2025/26, increasing substantially thereafter as Eskom continues to increase tariff rates in future years.
Additionally, in 2025, the school will be expanding its PV Solar options with the installation of an additional 120 kWp plant, together with 240kWh of battery capacity. This plant will be exclusively allocated to the boarding houses, which will hopefully remove them from the grid entirely.
Regarding our water consumption, the school has made tremendous leaps in reducing its impact on the environment. Pre-Covid, the school was consuming, on average, in excess of 240Kl of water on a daily basis. This was excessive and we had a substantial wastage problem through inefficient usage, leaking pipes and other factors.
At the beginning of 2022, we partnered with Aquaffection to reduce our water consumption. This programme improved the efficiency of usage through several methods and identified and repaired undetected underground leaks. Since then, we have reduced our daily consumption by over 20% and we now have a new average base line of around 190Kl per day.
With Aquaffection, we continue to look for opportunities to further improve our efficiency. We’re proud to announce that we are now approaching 130m litres of water saved since the inception of this partnership. Here’s to a greener future!
