Energy Management Principles Questions and Answers

Answer: A

An audit produces a snapshot and a list of measures; management is the standing arrangement that implements them, holds the gains and finds the next ones. A plant that audits every three years and manages nothing in between loses most of what it found.

Answer: B

Set points drift back, repairs are undone and equipment is left running because no one person's objectives include preventing it. Naming an accountable manager and giving the indicators to the people who can act on them is what makes the difference.

Answer: C

Technical analysis is the easier half; getting a set point changed, a repair scheduled or a budget released requires standing in the organisation. An energy manager reporting three levels down achieves far less than one reporting to the works director.

Answer: D

Correct answer: being displaced whenever a breakdown occurs

Maintenance work is driven by breakdowns, and a breakdown always outranks an improvement project. An energy manager reporting into that function loses their time to the urgent whenever the plant misbehaves, so the systematic work never gets done. The data and the audit remain available; what is lost is the attention, which is why the function is usually placed where it has its own objectives.

Answer: A

Those three commitments are what make a policy more than a statement of good intentions, because the third is what turns the first two into action. The measures themselves belong in the action plan rather than in the policy.

Answer: B

Correct answer: binds the organisation rather than one function

A policy signed by the chief executive commits every department, and it settles in advance the arguments about priority that an energy manager could not otherwise win. Signed at any lower level it becomes one function’s aspiration, which production and maintenance may decline to act on. The signature is about authority, not about form or filing.

Answer: C

A commitment to improve with no figure attached can be satisfied by any improvement however trivial, and it gives nobody a basis for asking whether enough has been done. Targets need not be in the policy itself provided the policy requires them to exist.

Answer: D

It sets out what the system must contain - policy, review, indicators, objectives, competence, control, monitoring, audit and review - without prescribing any particular technology or level of performance. Certification attests to the system rather than to the efficiency achieved.

Answer: A

The standard requires continual improvement of performance but sets no absolute benchmark, so a certified plant may still be less efficient than an uncertified one. What it guarantees is that the improvement is being managed rather than left to chance.

Answer: B

Each turn of the cycle plans against what the last one learned, so the system ratchets rather than plateaus. Treating it as a linear project is the commonest way an energy management system atrophies after its first year.