The main factors that the results highlight are that:

 

• The majority of people surveyed are interested in saving electricity at UCT.

• They also strongly believe that UCT needs to implement energy saving policies and think that electricity is used unnecessarily.

• Many of the suggestions to save electricity proposed by participants are already being undertaken by various initiatives at UCT. This suggests that most people don’t seem to know about these initiatives.

• There is a fair amount of people that do not partake in practices like switching monitors off and unplugging chargers and appliances.

• They had many ideas of where energy could be saved and ideas for marketing a campaign, creating hype and incentivizing energy saving. This shows that people have thought about this concept and would potentially be ready to participate in these practices.

 

So maybe UCT should...

embark on a campaign with encouraging behavioural change as its main element!

 

Some of the suggestion from the survey participants for such a campaign included:

 

• Holding competitions between departments and residences to meet an energy-saving challenge, and using prizes as incentives

• Implementing policies, or invest in operational structures, whereby

  • lights and data projectors are switched off in lecture theatres when they are not in use (they currently run all day long)

  • computers are switched off at night in labs that are closed for the night or not frequented

  • leaking taps and toilets can be reported and thus repaired as soon as possible

• Giving regular feedback in terms of consumption data (past research shows that feedback is a very important a feature in energy saving campaigns).

 

In addition, since the community do not seem very aware of UCT's current energy-saving policies and initiatives, they should perhaps be advertised more  to gather support.