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Here is a compilation of essays on ‘Energy Management’ for class 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on ‘Energy Management’ especially written for school and college students.
Essay on Energy Management
Essay Contents:
- Essay on the Meaning of Energy Management
- Essay on the Need for Energy Management
- Essay on How to Manage Energy?
- Essay on the Techniques Employed for Energy Management
- Essay on the Energy-Saving Meaning in Energy Management
- Essay on the Importance of Energy Management
- Essay on Managing the Energy Consumption
- Essay on Energy Conservation and Its Need in Energy Management
- Essay on the Environmental Aspects of Energy Management System
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Essay # 1. Meaning of Energy Management:
The use of energy has been a key in the development of the human society by helping it to control and adapt to the environment. Managing the use of energy is inevitable in any functional society.
In the industrialized world the development of energy resources has become essential for agriculture, transportation, waste collection, information technology, communications that have become prerequisites of a developed society. The increasing use of energy since the industrial revolution has also brought with it a number of serious problems, some of which, such as global warming, present potentially grave risks to the world.
In society and in the context of humanities, the word energy is used as a synonym of energy resources and most often refers to substances like fuels, petroleum products and electricity in general. These are sources of usable energy, in that they can be easily transformed to other kinds of energy sources that can serve a particular useful purpose.
Consumption of energy resources (e.g., turning on a light) requires resources and has an effect on the environment. Many electric power plants burn coal, oil or natural gas in order to generate electricity for energy needs. While burning these fossil fuels produces a readily available and instantaneous supply of electricity, it also generates air pollutants including carbon dioxide (CO2), sulphur dioxide and trioxide (SOx) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
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Carbon dioxide is an important greenhouse gas which is thought to be responsible for some fraction of the rapid increase in global warming seen especially in the temperature records in the 20th century, as compared with tens of thousands of years-worth of temperature records which can be read from ice cores taken in arctic regions.
Burning fossil fuels for electricity generation also releases trace metals such as beryllium, cadmium, chromium, copper, manganese, mercury, nickel and silver into the environment, which also act as pollutants. Certain renewable energy technologies do not pollute the environment in the same ways and therefore can help contribute to a cleaner energy future for the world.
Renewable energy technologies available for electricity production include bio fuels, solar power, tidal power, wind turbines, hydroelectric power, etc. However, serious environmental concerns have been articulated by several environmental activists regarding some of these modes of electricity generation.
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According to them, some pollution is invariably produced during the manufacture and retirement of the materials associated with the machinery used in these technologies. There is, however, general agreement that the most effective way to save the environment from expanding energy production is energy conservation.
Since the cost of energy has become a significant factor in the performance of economy of societies, management of energy resources has become very crucial. Energy management involves utilizing the available energy resources more effectively that is with minimum incremental costs.
Many times it is possible to save expenditure on energy without incorporating fresh technology by simple management techniques. Most often energy management is the practice of using energy more efficiently by eliminating energy wastage or to balance justifiable energy demand with appropriate energy supply. The process couples energy awareness with energy conservation.
Since now energy plays an essential role in industrial societies, the ownership and control of energy resources plays an increasing role in politics. At the national level, governments seek to influence the sharing (distribution) of energy resources among various sections of the society through pricing mechanisms; or even who owns resources within their borders. They may also seek to influence the use of energy by individuals and business in an attempt to tackle environmental issues.
Producing energy to sustain human needs is an essential socials activity and a great deal of effort goes into the activity. While most of such effort is limited towards increasing the production of electricity and oil, newer ways of producing usable energy resources from the available energy resources are being explored.
One such effort is to explore means of producing hydrogen fuel from water. Though hydrogen use is environmentally friendly, its production requires energy and existing technologies to make it are not very efficient.
Essay # 2. Need for Energy Management:
To achieve economic growth, we need to and have to use more and more energy to increase the pace of development. We need to increase the manufacturing of good in quality and volume.
It is estimated that industrial energy use in developing countries constitutes about 45-50% of the total commercial energy consumption. Much of this energy is converted from imported oil, the price of which has increased tremendously so much so that most of developing countries spent more than 50% of their foreign exchange earnings.
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Not with standing these fiscal constraints, developing countries need to expand its industrial base like India if it has to generate the resources to improve the quality of life of its people. The expansion of industrial base does require additional energy inputs which becomes more and more difficult in the present scenario.
Generation of power needs resources. Resources available on earth are of diminishing nature. It is getting depleted very fast with time as use is increasing exponentially. There are some resources, which are renewable, e.g., solar power, wind power and geothermal power. Technology is also being developed to harness these renewable resources to generate power.
The capital investment requirement is very high as compared to normally available resources. It can be quoted here that with the available technology, we could hardly generate 5% of total power generation as on date. Hence, to restrict the use or increase the life of diminishing type of resources.
Let us see the other aspect of life, whereas everybody can’t understand all technical reasons or benefits of the whole world until he himself realizes some benefit for his action or efforts. In this competitive world, cost competitiveness is very essential for survival of every individual. To establish any work/motive or task, energy in one or other form is an essential component.
Thus, the need to conserve energy, particularly in industry and commerce is strongly felt as the energy cost takes up substantial share in the overall cost structure of the operation. Hence it calls management of energy or in other words management of resources or energy conservation. Energy resources needs to be managed irrespective of a developed nation or a developing nation.
Essay # 3. How to Manage Energy?
Energy management is not by chance/incident/accident. It is a mission with a target. It can’t be done single handedly or by sitting on a table. It needs coordinated effort by team of energy conscious people with a milestone to be established.
Very concerted efforts in a planned manner to established energy management strategy needs to be established based on the target of energy conservation.
Strategy/Methodology of Energy Management:
Having established the need of energy management/conservation, a systematic approach needs to be discussed and concluded.
Same of steps to reach to the target of energy conservation can be listed as below:
(1) Identification of inefficient areas/equipment:
i. Enlistment or knowledge of type of energy being used.
ii. Study of machines/technology employed.
iii. Process study and identification of major energy consumption areas.
iv. In depth process study to identify the inefficient use of energy.
(2) Identification of technology/equipment requirement.
(3) Discussion, brain storming and conclusion of resources requirement.
(4) Management of resources like manpower, machine or technology.
(5) Evaluate your actions/efforts to estimate the rate of return.
‘Inefficient action/efforts cannot give efficient results.’ ‘Only efficient efforts and economic ideas need to be tested’.
(6) Implementation of new process/new technology/new machines.
(7) Re-evaluate your actions/your efforts.
Essay # 4. Techniques Employed for
Energy Management:
(1) Self-knowledge and awareness among the masses.
(2) Re-engineering and evaluation.
(3) Technology upgradations.
(1) Self-Knowledge and Awareness among the Masses:
For the successful energy management and implementation, the knowledge of process and machine for the leader is very important. On the first instance, there is always a resistance from the user. There might be psychological mind blocks in the user’s mind.
This needs to be made known and clarified. It is further more important to make the owner of the process understand the cost benefit of the energy conservation. Creating awareness to the process owner can give most economic and low cost solutions to save energy.
(2) Re-Engineering and Evaluation:
After utilizing the low cost or awareness concept, we need to do in depth study the process machine. We need to ascertain, the scope and extent of energy conservation in the area under consideration. Evaluate the existing situation/employed technology in terms of process requirements and production capacity and capability.
Sometimes, we do land into a situation of handicap with machine capacity and capability for the sake of energy conservation. It must not be done. Once it is established, that there is a potential of energy optimization. We need to start evaluation and re-engineering of the process /equipment. It may be terms of layout, motor capacity, types of starters employed, nature of loads, etc.
(3) Technology Upgradations:
After having established the scope of energy conservation in the specified area. The latest technology availability is suitability, sustainability and pricing needs to be studied.
Economics needs to be worked out like pay-back period, return of investment, quality of energy savings, etc.
Please Remember:
“Better the diagnosis, best will be the result”.
Essay # 5. The Energy-Saving Meaning in Energy Management:
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:
1. Metering your energy consumption and collecting the data.
2. Finding opportunities to save energy and estimating how much energy each opportunity could save. You would typically analyse 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 (e.g., lighting) or by upgrading equipment.
3. Taking action to target the opportunities to save energy (i.e., tackling the routine waste and replacing or upgrading the inefficient equipment).
4. 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…)
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 behavioural 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 term “energy management” is also used in other fields such as:
i. 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).
ii. It is used to refer to techniques for managing and controlling one’s own levels of personal energy.
Essay # 6. Importance of Energy Management:
Energy management is the key to saving energy in your organizations. 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.
The Global Need to Save Energy:
If it was not 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:
i. Reduce the damage that we are 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.
ii. Reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels that are becoming increasingly limited in supply.
Controlling and Reducing Energy Consumption at Your Organization:
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:
i. Reduce costs this is becoming increasingly important as energy costs rise.
ii. 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.
iii. 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 are supposed to be meeting at some worrying point in near future.
Essay # 7. Managing the Energy Consumption:
These are basic four steps involved in energy management such as in the case of energy management in building. Let us now discuss these four steps in detail taking the case of an energy management in a building that may be a commercial or home installation.
The Four Steps involved are:
1. Metering your energy consumption and collecting the data.
2. Finding and quantifying opportunities to save energy.
3. Targeting the opportunities to save energy.
4. Tracking your progress at saving energy.
1. Metering your Energy Consumption and Collecting the Data:
As a rule of thumb the more data you can get and the more detailed it is the better.
The old school approach to energy-data collection is to manually read meters once a week or once a month. This weekly or monthly data is not nearly as good the data that comes easily and automatically from the modern approach.
The modern approach to energy-data collection is to fit interval-metering systems that automatically measure and record energy consumption at short, regular intervals such as every 15-minutes or half hour. There’s more about this on our page about interval data.
Detailed interval energy consumption data makes it possible to see patterns of energy waste that it would be impossible to see otherwise. For example, there’s simply no way that weekly or monthly meter readings can show you how much energy you’re using at different times of the day or on different days of the week. And seeing these patterns makes it much easier to find the routine waste in your building.
2. Finding and Quantifying Opportunities to Save Energy:
i. The detailed meter data that you are collecting will be invaluable for helping you to find and quantify energy-saving opportunities.
ii. The easiest and most cost-effective energy-saving opportunities typically require little or no capital investment.
iii. And one of the simplest ways to save a significant amount of energy is to encourage staff to switch equipment off at the end of each working day.
iv. Looking at detailed interval energy data is the ideal way to find routine energy waste. You can check whether staff and timers are switching things off without having to patrol the building day and night and with a little detective work, you can usually figure out who or what is causing the energy wastage that you will inevitably find.
v. And, using your detailed interval data, it’s usually pretty easy to make reasonable estimates of how much energy is being wasted at different times.
For-example, if you’ve identified that a lot of energy is being wasted by equipment left on over the weekends, you can:
i. Use your interval data to calculate how much energy (in kWh) is being used each weekend.
ii. Estimate the proportion of that energy that is being wasted (by equipment that should be switched off).
iii. Using the figures from (a) and (b), calculate an estimate of the total kWh that are wasted each weekend.
Alternatively, if you have no idea of the proportion of energy that is being wasted by equipment left on unnecessarily, you could:
i. Walk the building one evening to ensure that everything that should be switched off is switched off.
ii. Look back at the data for that evening to see how many kW were being used after you switched everything off.
iii. Subtract the target kW figure (ii) from the typical kW figure for weekends to estimate the potential savings in kW (power).
iv. Multiple the kW savings by the number of hours over the weekend to get the total potential kWh energy savings for a weekend.
Also, most buildings have open to them a variety of equipment or building- fabric-related energy-saving opportunities, most of which require a more significant capital investment.
Although your detailed meter data won’t necessarily help you to find these equipment or building-fabric-related opportunities (e.g., it won’t tell you that a more efficient type of lighting equipment exists), it will be useful for helping you to quantify the potential savings that each opportunity could bring. It’s much more reliable to base your savings estimates on real metered data than on rules of thumb alone.
And it’s critically important to quantify the expected savings for any opportunity that you are considering investing a lot of time or money into it’s the only way you can figure out how to home in on the biggest, easiest energy savings first.
3. Targeting the Opportunities to Save Energy:
Just finding the opportunities to save energy won’t help you to save energy – you have to take action to target them.
For those energy-saving opportunities that require you to motivate the people in your building, our article on energy awareness should be useful. It can be hard work, but if you can get the people on your side, you can make some seriously big energy savings without investing anything other than time.
As for those energy-saving opportunities that require you to upgrade equipment or insulation assuming you’ve identified them, there’s little more to be said. Just keep your fingers crossed that you make your anticipated savings and be thankful that you don’t work for the sort of organization that won’t invest in anything with a payback period over 6 months.
4. Tracking Your Progress at Saving Energy:
Once you’ve taken action to save energy, it’s important that you find out how effective your actions have been:
i. Energy savings that come from behavioural changes (e.g., getting people to switch off their computers before going home) need ongoing attention to ensure that they remain effective and achieve their maximum potential.
ii. If you’ve invested money into new equipment, you’ll probably want to prove that you’ve achieved the energy savings you predicted.
iii. If you’ve corrected faulty timers or control-equipment settings, you’ll need to keep checking back to ensure that everything’s still working as it should be. Simple things like a power cut can easily cause timers to revert back to factory settings – if you’re not keeping an eye on your energy-consumption patterns you can easily miss such problems.
iv. If you’ve been given energy-saving targets from above, you’ll need to provide evidence that you’re meeting them or at least making progress towards that goal.
v. And occasionally you might need to prove that progress isn’t being made (e.g., if you’re at your wits end trying to convince the decision makers to invest some money into your energy-management drive).
Managing Your Energy Consumption Effectively is an Ongoing Process:
At the very least you should keep analyzing your energy data regularly to check that things aren’t getting worse. It’s pretty normal for unwatched buildings to become less efficient with time it’s to be expected that equipment will break down or lose efficiency and that people will forget the good habits you worked hard to encourage in the past.
So at a minimum you should take a quick look at your energy data once a week or even just once a month to ensure that nothing has gone horribly wrong. It’s a real shame when easy-to-fix faults such as misconfigured timers remain unnoticed for months on end leaving a huge energy bill that could have easily been avoided.
But ideally your energy-management drive will be an ongoing effort to find new opportunities to target (step 2), to target them (step 3), and to track your progress at making ongoing energy savings (step 4). Managing your energy consumption doesn’t have to be a full-time job, but you’ll achieve much better results it you make it part of your regular routine.
Essay # 8. Energy Conservation and Its Need in Energy Management:
Energy conservation is the key element in energy management.
Energy conservation refers to efforts made to reduce energy consumption. Energy conservation can be achieved through increased efficient energy use, in conjunction with decreased energy consumption and/or reduced consumption from conventional energy sources.
Energy conservation can result in increased financial capital, environmental quality, national security, personal security and human comfort. Individuals and organizations that are direct consumers of energy choose to conserve energy to reduce energy costs and promote economic security. Industrial and commercial users can increase energy use efficiency to maximize profit.
Electrical energy conservation is an important element of energy policy. Energy conservation reduces the energy consumption and energy demand per capita and thus offsets some of the growth in energy supply needed to keep up with population growth.
This reduces the rise in energy costs and can reduce the need for new power plants and energy imports. This reduced energy demand can provide more flexibility in choosing the most preferred methods of energy production.
By reducing emissions, energy conservation is an important part of lessening climate change. Energy conservation facilitates the replacement of non-renewable resources with renewable energy. Energy conservation is often the most economical solution to energy shortages and is a more environmentally being alternative to increased energy production.
Why should we save energy?
“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs but not every man’s greed”. — Mahatma Gandhi
We need to save energy as:
i. We use energy faster than it can be produced. Coal, oil and natural gas – the most utilized sources take thousands of years for formation.
ii. Energy resources are limited. India has approximately 1% of world’s energy resources but it has 16% of world population.
iii. Most of the energy sources we use cannot be reused and renewed. Non-renewable energy sources constitute 80% of the fuel use. It is said that our energy resources may last only for another 40 years or so.
iv. We save the country a lot of money when we save energy. About 75 percent of our crude oil needs are met from imports which would cost about Rs. 1,50,000 crores a year.
v. We save our money when we save energy. Imagine your savings if your LPG cylinder comes for an extra week or there is a cut in your electricity bills.
vi. We save our energy when we save energy. When we use fuel wood efficiently, our fuel wood requirements are lower and so is our drudgery for its collection.
vii. Energy saved is energy generated. When we save one unit of energy, it is equivalent to 2 units of energy produced.
viii. Save energy to reduce pollution. Energy production and use account to large proportion of air pollution and more than 83 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
ix. It is our duty to conserve today for tomorrow’s use. An old Indian saying indicates ‘The earth, water and the air are not a gift to us from our parents but a loan for our children’.
Essay # 9. Environmental Aspects of Energy Management System:
Environmental aspects are the building blocks of energy management system. The identification of environmental aspects is an important step towards recognizing their impact on our planet. This proves helpful in setting and formulating objectives, targets and other programs that may be directed towards solving environmental problems.
Environmental aspect and environmental impacts have cause and effect relationship with each other. As we know that the process of energy- generation, transport and utilization leads to environmental problems. Implications of these problems need to be closely studied. So, environmental aspects and their impacts need to be addressed as these are the part of energy management system.
IS014001 requires:
i. ‘The organization shall establish and maintain a procedure to identify the environmental aspects of its activities, products and services that it can control and over which it can be expected to have an influence, in order to determine those which have or can have significant impacts on the environment’.
Definition of Environmental Aspects:
IS014001 defines an environmental aspects as an:
i. ‘Element of an organization’s activities, products or services that can interact with the environment’.
Aspects can be:
i. Regulated or Non-Regulated
ii. Natural or Man-Made
iii. Positive or Negative
iv. Controlled or Influenced by the Organization
Examples of Aspects:
Inputs:
i. Traffic
ii. Chemicals:
a. Corrosives
b. Flammables
c. Toxics
d. Contained gases
iii. Resource use:
a. Energy
b. Water
Outputs:
i. Wastewater
ii. Fumes (air emissions)
iii. Solid waste
iv. Hazardous waste
v. Noise
vi. Traffic
Environmental Impacts:
Environmental aspects and environmental impacts have cause and effect relationship. A significant environmental aspect is one that may produce a significant environmental impact.
IS014001 defines environmental impact as:
i. “Any change to the environment, whether adverse or beneficial, wholly or partially resulting from an organization’s activities, products or services”
IS014001 defines the environment as:
i. “Surroundings in which an organization operates, including air, water, land, natural resources, flora, flauna, humans and their interrelation”.
Note:
Surroundings in this context extend from within an organization to the global system.
Examples of Impacts:
General:
i. Depletion of Natural Resources
ii. Destruction of Habitats
Water:
i. pH
ii. Oxygen Level
iii. Toxicity
Air:
i. Air Toxicity
ii. Smog
iii. Global Warming
iv. Ozone Depletion
Cause and Effect:
Environmental aspects and environmental impacts.
