By: Peter Rowles

In 1979, just a year out of school, I jumped at an opportunity to move into energy management, a bold move for an electrical engineer who slept through most of his thermodynamics classes. It was an opportunity to help companies save energy and money. At the time, I was working for a utility. My employer justified helping customers because it allowed them to use their generating capacity and infrastructure more effectively.  The government, which regulated the utility, encouraged this activity as it also helped to conserved valuable natural resources and secure its supply for future generations.

The more I got immersed in energy management I found that saving energy improved productivity, increased profitability and created jobs. While working on industrial heat recovery projects in the late 80s, I realized the enormous impact that saving energy can have on reducing harmful emissions, including greenhouse gases, to the environment. No matter where I travel to work, these same benefits of energy management exist. Energy management is a “Win-Win-Win” proposition – its good for people, the economy and the environment.  As I look back over my energy management career, I can safely say I have never lost any sleep over that impulsive decision, almost 30 years ago, because saving energy is the right thing to do.

Today, more than ever, energy management is not only the right thing to do, it is the socially responsible thing to do. The inefficient use of energy, by growing global economy, is threatening to deplete our natural resources and suffocate the earth with greenhouse gases.

Fundamentally, we need energy to provide a safe, reliable and comfortable environment in which to live and work. We need energy to travel, and to produce the goods and services we need. A good organization needs to understand the energy supply train – how energy can be transformed from its raw state (oil, natural gas, wood, water, wind solar, etc), into an energy commodity  (Btus, GJ, kWhs), transported and cost effectively converted to meet the needs of the end user in an environmentally responsible way. This is a broad and complex topic. It requires knowledge of government policies and regulations, finance, risk management, accounting, marketing, human resources, economics, engineering, technology, the environment and, let’s not forget, thermodynamics. To complicate matters further, all of these areas are constantly changing. Successful energy management requires a process that can deal with all of these factors.

In upcoming articles, I will be addressing how to drive this energy management process as it relates to the commercial, industrial and institutional end user.  I intend to provide sound timely advice and support for developing and implementing effective energy management programs. I will discuss topics such as:

• Corporate commitment;
• Strategic planning;
• Government and utility incentives;
• Energy awareness;
• Project development and implementation; and
• Renewable energy opportunities.

So, I will end off this first article with a thought taken, and slightly modified, from a cartoon my kids used to watch. “What are we going to do in the next article? The same we do in every article. Try to save the world!”