Module 1: Power and Energy Fundamentals
Welcome to Module 1. This module establishes the core knowledge you'll need for ITAC work. Before you can evaluate equipment efficiency or recommend improvements, you must understand how facilities buy, measure, and pay for energy.
Energy assessment work requires fluency in electrical systems and utility billing structures. After all, that's how we measure the savings. Start with power and energy, apply those concepts to AC systems, and then connect measurements to utility costs.
Module Objectives
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
- Distinguish power from energy and calculate energy from operating power and on-time
- Convert between electrical and thermal units, keeping energy separate from rates
- Compare purchased energy with useful heat using equipment efficiency
- Identify single-phase and three-phase systems and distinguish wye from delta connections
- Calculate real and apparent input power for single-phase and balanced three-phase loads, and reactive power under sinusoidal conditions
- Explain why power factor is not efficiency and how it affects current, capacity, and costs
- Interpret commercial utility bills including demand charges, ratchet clauses, and power factor penalties
- Apply power and energy concepts to facility assessments
In This Module
- Power and Energy — foundational electrical and thermal units, and the conversions between them
- AC Power — single- and three-phase systems, and real, reactive, and apparent power
- Utilities — commercial billing structures, demand charges, ratchet clauses, and power factor penalties