The World Energy Engineering Congress (WEEC) is an international energy industry conference and exposition hosted annually by the Association of Energy Engineers. [1]
The Association of Energy Engineers (AEE), founded in 1977, is a nonprofit professional society whose stated mission is “to promote the scientific and educational interests of those engaged in the energy industry and to foster action for sustainable development.”
Professionals in the field of energy engineering from around the world convene annually at the WEEC to discuss energy-related issues and technology such as:
Energy engineering or energy systems engineering is a broad field of engineering dealing with energy efficiency, energy services, facility management, plant engineering, environmental compliance and alternative energy technologies. Energy engineering is one of the more recent engineering disciplines to emerge. Energy engineering combines knowledge from the fields of physics, math, and chemistry with economic and environmental engineering practices. Energy engineers apply their skills to increase efficiency and further develop renewable sources of energy. The main job of energy engineers is to find the most efficient and sustainable ways to operate buildings and manufacturing processes. Energy engineers audit the use of energy in those processes and suggest ways to improve the systems. This means suggesting advanced lighting, better insulation, more efficient heating and cooling properties of buildings. Although an energy engineer is concerned about obtaining and using energy in the most environmentally friendly ways, their field is not limited to strictly renewable energy like hydro, solar, biomass, or geothermal. Energy engineers are also employed by the fields of oil and natural gas extraction.
- Energy efficiency and energy management
- Renewable, green, and alternative energy
- Combined heat and power, cogeneration, and distributed generation
- Integrated building automation and energy management
- Lighting efficiency
- HVAC systems and controls
- Thermal storage and load management
- Boilers and combustion controls
- Geoexchange technologies
- Solar and fuel cell technologies
- Applications specific to federal emergency management programs
- Energy services and project financing
Efficient energy use, sometimes simply called energy efficiency, is the goal to reduce the amount of energy required to provide products and services. For example, insulating a home allows a building to use less heating and cooling energy to achieve and maintain a comfortable temperature. Installing LED lighting, fluorescent lighting, or natural skylight windows reduces the amount of energy required to attain the same level of illumination compared to using traditional incandescent light bulbs. Improvements in energy efficiency are generally achieved by adopting a more efficient technology or production process or by application of commonly accepted methods to reduce energy losses.
Energy management includes planning and operation of energy production and energy consumption units. Objectives are resource conservation, climate protection and cost savings, while the users have permanent access to the energy they need. It is connected closely to environmental management, production management, logistics and other established business functions. The VDI-Guideline 4602 released a definition which includes the economic dimension: “Energy management is the proactive, organized and systematic coordination of procurement, conversion, distribution and use of energy to meet the requirements, taking into account environmental and economic objectives”.
Cogeneration or combined heat and power (CHP) is the use of a heat engine or power station to generate electricity and useful heat at the same time. Trigeneration or combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) refers to the simultaneous generation of electricity and useful heating and cooling from the combustion of a fuel or a solar heat collector. The terms cogeneration and trigeneration can be also applied to the power systems generating simultaneously electricity, heat, and industrial chemicals – e.g., syngas or pure hydrogen.
