Jonathan Kong Chun-ho sits in an Island School science laboratory and peers into his monitor. A series of cleanly laid out figures and a bar graph pop up, but he is not in a conventional science lesson.
'What you can see here is a calculation of how much electricity we have saved at school today,' he says.
The figures he was looking at link directly to a one-storey-high turbine and nearly 15 square metres of solar panels on the roof of the science block. Together, they supply about 10 per cent of all the power going into the block, every kilowatt of which is measured and recorded for any of the school's 1,100 students to access online.
The figures for that day show that the rooftop systems should produce about 5 kilowatts of power, but they can produce up to about 10kW depending on weather conditions.
Nearly 275kW of electricity has been produced, avoiding the burning of fossil fuels that would have sent 200 kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere, in the three weeks the project has been running.
The system also tells Jonathan that HK$280 has been saved in electricity costs in the past month - more than 10 per cent of the roughly HK$2,000 electricity bill the science block usually pays.
