All forms of commerce require energy. Industrial processing and manufacturing facilities tend to be the largest consumers, but even service industries such as insurance and banking require large buildings which must be heated, cooled and lit. The newest large energy consuming enterprises are data centers, which are large clusters of computers which store and serve up the data which flows through the internet. Regardless of the end use or the industry, companies strive to minimize production costs by minimizing energy consumption.

In addition to economic incentives, it is increasingly accepted that every BTU that is generated by burning fossil fuels (the source of the majority of our energy) leads to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This, in turn, appears to be causing some undesirable changes in the global climate. There are now more reasons than ever to focus on energy management in manufacturing.