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The what and why of energy management

What is energy management?

"Energy management" is a term that has a number of meanings, but we're mainly concerned with the one that relates to saving energy in businesses, public-sector/government organizations and homes.

The energy-saving meaning

When it comes to energy saving, energy management is the process of monitoring, controlling, and conserving energy in a building or organization. Typically this involves the following steps:

• Metering your energy consumption and collecting the data.

• Finding opportunities to save energy, and estimating how much energy each opportunity could save. You would typically analyze your meter data to find and quantify routine energy waste, and you might also investigate the energy savings that you could make by replacing equipment or by upgrading your building's insulation.

• Taking action to target the opportunities to save energy (i.e. tackling the routine waste and replacing or upgrading the inefficient equipment). Typically you'd start with the best opportunities first.

• Tracking your progress by analyzing your meter data to see how well your energy-saving efforts have worked.

And then back to step 2, and the cycle continues.

To confuse matters, many people use "energy management" to refer specifically to those energy-saving efforts that focus on making better use of existing buildings and equipment. Strictly speaking, this limits things to the behavioral aspects of energy saving (i.e. encouraging people to use less energy by raising energy awareness), although the use of cheap control equipment such as timer switches is often included in the definition as well.

The above four-step process applies either way - it's entirely up to you whether you consider energy-saving measures that involve buying new equipment or upgrading building fabric.

Other meanings

It's not just about saving energy in buildings - the term "energy management" is also used in other fields:

• It's something that energy suppliers (or utility companies) do to ensure that their power stations and renewable energy sources generate enough energy to meet demand (the amount of energy that their customers need).

• It's used to refer to techniques for managing and controlling one's own levels of personal energy. We're far from qualified to say anything more about this.

Energy consumption

Energy management is the means to controlling and reducing your organization's energy consumption, and controlling and reducing your organization's energy consumption is important because it enables you to:

• Reduce costs - this is becoming increasingly important as energy costs rise.

• Reduce carbon emissions and the environmental damage that they cause - as well as the cost-related implications of carbon taxes and the like, your organization may be keen to reduce its carbon footprint to promote a green, sustainable image. Not least because promoting such an image is often good for the bottom line.

• Reduce risk - the more energy you consume, the greater the risk that energy price increases or supply shortages could seriously affect your profitability, or even make it impossible for your business/organization to continue. With energy management you can reduce this risk by reducing your demand for energy and by controlling it so as to make it more predictable.

On top of these reasons, it's quite likely that you have some rather aggressive energy-consumption-reduction targets that you're supposed to be meeting at some worrying point in the near future. Your understanding of effective energy management will hopefully be the secret weapon that will enable you to meet those aggressive targets.

Why is it important?

Energy management is the key to saving energy in your organization. Much of the importance of energy saving stems from the global need to save energy - this global need affects energy prices, emissions targets and legislation, all of which lead to several compelling reasons why you should save energy at your organization specifically.

If it wasn't for the global need to save energy, the term "energy management" might never have even been coined. Globally we need to save energy in order to:

• Reduce the damage that we're doing to our planet, Earth. As a human race we would probably find things rather difficult without the Earth, so it makes good sense to try to make it last.

• Reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels that are becoming increasingly limited in supply.

In this photo taken Oct. 5, 2010 in Bloomington,Ill., a combine harvests a field beneath Horizon Wind Energy's Twin Groves Wind Farm. Wind farm expansion has exploded across central Illinois as energy companies and local property owners find money blowing in the wind. (AP Photo/The Pantagraph, David Proeber)
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