An Energy Audit-based Case Study on varied Organizations

Our day-to-day life most commonly demands dealing with Electrical energy, which has made a deep-rooted impact on our lives becoming one of the primary sources of energy driving humanity forward. With the ever-increasing use of electricity, it is imperative to know how it is being spent. Energy Auditing is a tool for identifying energy efficiency potential and measures for assessing their financial viability, which can be carried out at different levels. On comprehensive levels, it can form a fundamental basis for introducing and establishing Energy Management Systems (EMS) in enterprises/ other institutions. This paper presents a case study based on the principles of Energy auditing conducted on different types of establishments. Along with analyzing the energy usage patterns of different organizations, the main objective of this paper is to investigate how the quality of power affects the energy usage in respective organizations. This paper tries to address various power quality issues that were encountered during the energy audit process; primarily focusing on harmonics, power factor and unbalance. Energy auditing was conducted using various power quality analyzers to record the data from the electricity feeders which is later analyzed with the help of software. The Data Samples collected from various organizations are used to drive the investigation. This paper aims to form a quantitative comparison as to how the power quality issues vary with the type of organization and the ways to mitigate these fluctuations.

I. Introduction

Continuous energy audit is essential to reducing energy consumptions and for identifying energy efficiency potential and measures [1]. As per the Energy Conservation Act 2001, an Energy Audit is defined as “the verification, monitoring and analysis of energy including submission of technical report containing recommendations for improving energy efficiency with cost benefit analysis and inaction plan to reduce energy consumption” [2]–[3]. While considering the energy consumption of any organization, it is necessary to minimize the usage of electricity for economic and efficient working of the system; its conservation can bring significant cost saving due to its inflated costing.