  We study the role of correlation in mechanisms of energy exchange between an
interacting bipartite quantum system and its environment by decomposing the
energy of the system to local and correlation-related contributions. When the
system Hamiltonian is time-independent, no external work is performed. In this
case, energy exchange between the system and its environment occurs only due to
the change in the state of the system. We investigate possibility of a special
case where the energy exchange with the environment occurs exclusively due to
changes in the correlation between the constituent parts of the bipartite
system, while their local energies remain constant. We find sufficient
conditions for preserving local energies. It is proven that under these
conditions and within the Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) dynamics
this scenario is not possible for all initial states of the bipartite system.
Nevertheless, it is still possible to find special initial states for which the
local energies remain unchanged during the associated evolution and the whole
energy exchange is only due to the change in the correlation energy. We
illustrate our results with an example.
