Why Electricity Usage in Singapore is So Low

I just started an MITx class called Sustainable Building Design with Christoph Reinhart. He’s from Germany, the country that gets the highest percentage of its energy from solar of any country in the world, and his class is about how to heat, cool, and light up buildings in the most energy-efficient way possible.

The first thing I learned is that there’s fancy architect words for almost everything. For example, what everyone else calls “windows”, architects call “glazing”. “Daylighting” is putting in windows. And a “daylight factor” is how much light comes in through those windows.

Another thing I learned is that the huge differences in energy usage among countries are not exactly what you might predict. Look at this chart:

Each person in the U.S. uses more than twice the electricity of their counterparts in the U.K., Germany, or Japan. Electricity usage in the Middle East is off the chart because a) it’s really really hot and b) electricity is so heavily subsidized it’s basically free.

But what about Singapore, which is also extremely hot? How is the energy usage there similar to temperate France or Japan?

Having lived in both the U.S. and Singapore, I’ve seen that there are huge differences in construction codes as well as living habits.

First of all, Singapore homes are much smaller than the U.S. The average home here is 700 sqft vs. 2700 sqft in the U.S. Smaller homes mean less square footage to cool and fewer lights in fewer rooms.

95% of homes in Singapore are in multifamily HDBs (apartments) or condominiums, whereas the vast majority of homes in the U.S. are single family detached houses. Multifamily homes use far less energy than single family homes.

Then there’s major differences in cooling and hot water. Whereas U.S. homes are cooled by either window units or central HVAC systems, in Singapore the predominant AC system are the far more energy efficient minisplits. With a central HVAC system you can only heat or cool your entire home, but with a minisplit system you can choose to selectively cool only the rooms that are occupied. U.S. homes have large hot water tanks that are always on, whereas Singaporean homes come with on/off switches to turn the hot water on when you need it.

Unfortunately, the low cost of natural gas (thanks to fracking) has made Americans uninterested in reducing their electricity expenditures for purely economic reasons. Hopefully we can see more adoption of energy-efficient technology in the near future.