Energy Management Principles

Applications, Benefits, Savings

Craig B. Smith, Kelly E. Parmenter

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780128026441
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Energy Management Principles: Applications, Benefits, Savings, Second Edition is a comprehensive guide to the fundamental principles and systematic processes of maintaining and improving energy efficiency and reducing waste.

Fully revised and updated with analysis of world energy utilization, incentives and utility rates, and new content highlighting how energy efficiency can be achieved through 1 of 16 outlined principles and programs, the book presents cost effective analysis, case studies, global examples, and guidance on building and site auditing.

This fully revised edition provides a theoretical basis for conservation, as well as the avenues for its application, and by doing so, outlines the potential for cost reductions through an analysis of inefficiencies.

• Provides extensive coverage of all major fundamental energy management principles
• Applies general principles to all major components of energy use, such as HVAC, electrical end use and lighting, and transportation
• Describes how to initiate an energy management program for a building, a process, a farm or an industrial facility

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of energy management, its importance in human affairs today, and the purpose of the book. Around the world, in industrial and non-industrial nations alike, there is a growing awareness of the vital role energy plays in the economy. Efficient energy use can save money while at the same time mitigating environmental consequences due to emissions from internal combustion engines and power plants. The world is at a historic balance point where large emerging economies in Asia and South America are experiencing a rapid growth in demand for energy. How this demand is met has far-reaching consequences. Energy management is an important tool for enabling humankind to meet the challenges of the future: providing employment, food, and security for the next generations, in an environmentally sound manner.

Keywords

Oil embargo; oil prices; energy crisis; purpose of book; definitions; energy management; load management; energy quality; available work

Introduction

Energy is essential to life and survival. Reduced to bare essentials, stripped of thermodynamics, economics, and politics, this is how we must view it.

Energy may well be the item for which historians remember the last half of the twentieth century, as it marked the beginning of a new era of change, an era of possibly greater fundamental significance than the Industrial Revolution. For several centuries mankind grew lazy, lulled into complacency by the ease with which multitudes could be fed, housed, and transported using the abundant supplies of low-cost energy that were readily available.

Then, in less than a decade (1973–1981) the bubble that had taken 114 years to swell (since Drake’s first well in 1859) finally burst. Long unheeded warnings took on a prophetic aspect as fuel shortages and rising costs nearly paralyzed industrial economies and literally shocked the world into an inflationary period that lasted years.

It is remarkable that our lives could be so affected by one perturbation to the world economy. Figure 1.1 shows what this perturbation was—initially, a tenfold increase in crude oil prices in less than a decade, followed by two decades of relatively constant prices as efficiency measures were invoked worldwide to curtail demand. Then, at the beginning of the new millennium, prices skyrocketed again, more than tripling in 8 years. Note that Figure 1.1 shows the average annual oil prices, so the spikes and dips are smoothed out. Following 2008 the global recession brought about a drop in demand, causing the price to plummet, but in 4 short years it returned to hover near US$100 per barrel. Next, as the U.S. dramatically moved to become a net exporter of oil, the OPEC countries, principally Saudi Arabia, began flooding world markets with oil, causing a precipitous plunge in the average price. Over a period of a few months it dropped from US$95.85 per barrel in September 2014 to US$40 per barrel in August, 2015.

Figure 1.1 Average historic oil prices.

One thing is certain—low oil prices undercut the incentive for higher cost renewable energy and for electric or hybrid vehicles. Low prices also detract from efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A more draconian objective is to push higher cost shale oil, tar sands, or offshore oil producers out of the market, and even drive them to bankruptcy.¹ A certain sign of this is a rapid increase in the number of idle drilling rigs, as has occurred in early 2015. On the one hand this leads to a loss of jobs; on the other hand, cheap fuel reduces transportation and manufacturing costs, so it is not without some short-term economic benefit.

Of course, in reality the problem is much more complex, involving not only oil prices but also the uneven geographical distribution of energy resources, the exponential growth of populations and fuel consumption, the desires of poorer nations throughout the world, political and national security considerations, and long-term environmental effects.²

Tragically, the finiteness of energy resources can be a cause for moving the world into war. Resources of all types are essential to war, and in themselves can be causes for the rise and fall of nations. Twenty-five centuries ago, Greece denuded its forests building ships to continue the Peloponnesian wars; in 1940, Germany seized the Rumanian oil fields at Ploesti when it could no longer import petroleum due to the British blockade; a year later Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in order to gain access to oil and mineral resources in the South Pacific. In the Six Day War (1967), the Israelis captured the Egyptian oilfields in Sinai, while in its 1980 attack on Iran, Iraq went after the large Abadan refinery complex and other strategic points in Iran’s oil-producing western province of Khuzestan. Later, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and its threatening of the vast oil resources of Saudi Arabia triggered the first Gulf War and indirectly went on to cause a huge turmoil in the Middle East that has continued for more than two decades at an enormous cost in live...