The authors introduce the concept of Laplacian energy of a graph \(G\) by letting \(LE(G)=\sum_{i=1}^n | \mu_i - \frac{2m}{n}| \), where \(\mu_i\), \(i=1,\dots,n\), are the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix of \(G\). They show that the above definition is well chosen and much in analogy with the usual graph energy \(E(G)\), which is the sum of absolute values of eigenvalues of the adjacency matrix of \(G\). Indeed, they do coincide in the case of regular graphs. In the rest of the paper, the authors prove for \(LE(G)\) the analogues of several inequalities that hold for \(E(G)\).