Energy Conservation and Management Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The star labelling programme for appliances and buildings in India is run by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), the agency under the Ministry of Power set up under the Energy Conservation Act, 2001. BSES is an electricity distribution company in Delhi, NTPC is a power generating company, and BEB is not an agency of this kind. The answer is BEE, option A.

Answer: A

The barriers to implementing industrial end use energy efficiency that an energy audit lists are economic and financial (the cost of the investment), regulatory (rules and tariffs that discourage savings) and informational (a lack of data and awareness). The key gives technical as the one that is not a barrier, since the efficiency technologies are mostly available and proven, so the difficulty is not that the technology does not exist. This is the setter's view and not a fixed rule, and the explanation follows the key, option A.

Answer: A

The key gives wood as the sector that does not have the potential to raise energy savings by more than 10 per cent through recycling. Recycling aluminium saves about 95 per cent of the energy needed to make it from ore, steel recycling saves about 60 to 75 per cent, and recycling plastics also saves a large share of the energy of making it from raw materials, so all three offer more than 10 per cent. Recycled wood products do not give such a large saving in the energy audit figures that the setter has in mind, so wood is the exception. The explanation follows the key, option A.

Answer: D

The key gives rubber as the production unit that does not produce a substantial waste product. Paper mills (black liquor and sludge), aluminium smelting (red mud and spent pot lining) and glass making (cullet and dust) are all taken to have large waste streams, while rubber processing is considered a lesser waste producer here, since scrap rubber is mostly reused or recycled. This is a matter of the setter's classification and I could not confirm it from an independent source. The explanation follows the key, option D.

Answer: B

Using maximum daylight, switching off appliances when they are not in use and getting an energy audit done all reduce the consumption of energy. An LED bulb gives the same light for about one fifth to one eighth of the power of an incandescent bulb, so replacing LED bulbs with incandescent bulbs would waste energy and does not support conservation. The answer is option B.