Energy Consumption, Pandemic Period and Online Academic Education: Case Studies in Romanian Universities

Objectively, electricity is the most important current power source and, especially, of the future. Electricity consumption in universities worldwide is achieved by installations and equipment both in laboratories, classrooms, applications, and sports, in the rooms of administrative staff, and campus. Depending on the specializations, each university has a specific footprint of electricity consumption. During the pandemic of 2020, the world introduced several measures to limit the spread of the Covid virus, including online education in academia. Thus, in terms of electricity consumption, universities recorded a decrease during the pandemic, but there was an increase in household consumption for teachers and students. The subject of this paper is a quantitative analysis of the data provided by four universities in Romania on electricity consumption recorded before and during the pandemic. These data are correlated with household electricity consumption for the same two time periods, which were collected from some teachers and students in a university. A percentage of the decrease respectively increase of these electricity consumptions is due to the use of computers in the university respectively at home. That is why the measurements performed on a personal computer connected to the Teams platform used in the online education system are presented and analyzed. All these data and comparative analyses are especially useful for any university in the country or worldwide.