Energy Engineering

Energy engineering is a multidisciplinary branch of engineering focused on optimizing energy systems, developing renewable energy technology and improving energy efficiency, drawing on physics, mathematics and chemistry together with economic and environmental practice. Its working range spans energy harvesting and storage, energy conversion, the materials that make energy systems work, and the modeling and environmental compliance that a large energy system now has to satisfy. Much of an energy engineer's practical work is closer to the ground than the phrase "energy systems" suggests: auditing how a building or manufacturing process actually uses energy and recommending concrete improvements, from more efficient lighting and insulation to better heating and cooling design, alongside the larger-scale work of designing and running plant-level energy infrastructure and renewable generation. As a comparatively recent engineering discipline, energy engineering emerged from the convergence of older specialties, mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering among them, around the specific problem of energy itself: how it is generated, converted, stored and used efficiently, rather than around any one underlying technology.