The University of Cape Town had an institution-wide energy-efficiency plan in place in 2024, embedded within its annual carbon-management process and targeted at reducing electricity demand across its campuses.

UCT’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy (ESS) provides the institutional framework that guides all energy-efficiency and carbon-reduction initiatives, including the Khusela Ikamva Sustainable Campus Project. The ESS commits the university to becoming a net-zero carbon/energy campus by or before 2050, with energy reduction and cleaner energy sourcing positioned as central pillars of this goal. Within the strategy, UCT identifies energy consumption in buildings as the largest contributor to its carbon footprint and therefore prioritises measures such as reducing grid-electricity demand, improving building performance, expanding on-site renewable generation, and ensuring that all new capital projects meet enhanced green-building standards. These commitments are operationalised through actions such as energy metering improvements, efficiency upgrades in lighting and HVAC systems, shifts from fossil-fuel-based heating (e.g., LPG) to electric heat-pump technologies, and the phased rollout of solar PV infrastructure. The ESS therefore provides the overarching policy direction that links UCT’s long-term decarbonisation target with practical, measurable energy-efficiency interventions across its campuses.

The Khusela Ikamva Sustainable Campus Project forms a core part of UCT’s institutional approach to reducing energy consumption and improving environmental performance. Launched as a five-year whole-campus initiative, the project brings together operational departments and academic researchers to develop evidence-based interventions that improve the efficiency of campus systems. UCT describes the project as prioritising energy efficiency and rooftop solar photovoltaics as major focus areas, identifying these as key opportunities for “living lab” experimentation and demonstrable reductions in energy use across the built environment. The initiative explicitly aims to model and test scalable solutions such as efficient lighting, improved HVAC performance, upgraded metering, and behavioural energy-saving interventions, integrating them into the university’s broader carbon-management strategy.

A further component of Khusela Ikamva is the development of an integrated monitoring and evaluation framework that uses campus data to track energy performance, identify inefficiencies and guide continual improvement. By aligning facilities management, sustainability experts and academic partners, the project embeds energy-efficiency planning into UCT’s long-term infrastructure strategy, including the expansion of solar PV systems and the optimisation of electricity demand on Main Campus—the university’s largest source of energy use. The project is intended not only to reduce UCT’s operational energy footprint but also to generate research-led insights that inform future energy-efficiency standards, retrofit approaches and sustainable building practices across the institution.

The 2024 Carbon Footprint Assessment Report identifies electricity consumption—particularly on Main Campus, which accounts for 64% of all purchased-electricity emissions—as the university’s largest controllable energy demand and therefore the central focus of UCT’s efficiency strategy.

The report’s Carbon Management section explicitly recommends that UCT prioritise “energy efficiency initiatives throughout its campuses for lighting and air conditioning,” noting that reductions in grid electricity use represent the greatest opportunity for lowering emissions and overall consumption. UCT is actively implementing this strategy: the university has progressively replaced LPG water heaters with heat-pump systems, resulting in a multi-year decline in LPG use; improved its building-level metering to enhance consumption tracking; and continued with the planned rollout of solar PV installations, which complement energy-efficiency measures by reducing reliance on grid electricity.

The report also records that UCT’s new and refurbished buildings are being aligned with improved performance standards, and that the institution is preparing for a transition to wheeled renewable electricity from 2027, which is integrated with efficiency planning to minimise future grid demand. These measures demonstrate that UCT not only has a documented energy-efficiency plan but is implementing it through targeted operational changes, infrastructure upgrades and continual monitoring to reduce overall energy consumption.