Energy and Education Hub at Waterford Kamhlaba

A Waterford Kamhlaba former student contributed funds to enable the building of an energy monitoring and education centre. The primary focus of the centre is the display of energy usage around the campus, made possible by the installation of monitoring hardware at points around the campus. The centre also serves as a meeting point for staff and students to enable discussions centred around climate change and renewable energy. After a major lightning incident much monitoring equipment was damaged, but we are getting it going again. The link above shows the live feed of the output of one of the school’s solar panel arrays. The graph is interactive, so you can zoom in and out on the horizontal axis.

The relevant hardware and software are open source, from https://openenergymonitor.org/. This makes it both economical and educationally sound, as interested students can dive in under the hood as far as they like.