Implementation costs are a major factor in manufacturers’ decisions to invest in energy-efficient technologies. Emerging technologies in lighting systems, however, typically require small investment costs and offer short, simple payback periods, due, in part, to federal, state, and utility incentive programs. Recently, however, certain state and federal mandates have reduced the support for and efficacy of electricity utility incentivizing programs. To determine the impact of such support programs, this study examined historical data regarding lighting retrofit savings, implementation costs, and utility rebates gathered from 13 years of industrial energy audits by a U.S. Department of Energy Industrial Assessment Center in a midwestern state. It uses a machine learning approach to evaluate the industrial energy and cost-saving opportunities that may have been lost due to decisions attributable to legislative mandates, utility policies, and manufacturers’ calculations and to evaluate the potential effect of lighting rebates on manufacturers’ decisions to implement industrial energy-efficient lighting retrofits. The results indicate that the decision not to implement lighting energy efficiency recommendations resulted in a loss of more than USD800,000 in potential rebates by industries during the study period and that the implementation of lighting energy assessment recommendations could have increased by about 50% if electric utility rebates had been available. These findings can help industries evaluate the benefits of implementing lighting efficiency improvements, and help utilities determine feasible lighting retrofit rebate values for incentivizing such changes by the industries they serve.
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are usually an industry's highest consumer of energy, most of which goes toward space cooling in buildings. Industrial energy efficiency audits not only benefit manufacturers but also generate significant economic and environmental benefits to localities, states, and the nation. This article analyzes the micro and macro scale impacts of implementing the energy-efficient HVAC systems by integrating the industrial building energy data with the macro-economic regional economic flow model. Micro-scale data includes ten years of historical energy, cost, and carbon dioxide savings achieved from energy-efficient HVAC implementation offered to manufacturers through industrial energy audits. The data was integrated into the macroeconomic modeling framework to illuminate the cascading regional economic impacts of implementing energy-efficient HVAC recommendations in manufacturing facilities. Results show that if recommendations had been implemented throughout all manufacturers in the region, 656M energy costs would have been directly saved, 7.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions would have been avoided, and 4, 387 jobs could have been created, resulting in a total annual economic impact of899M stemming from direct, indirect, and induced impacts. The results offer insight into how industrial energy systems can be designed and provide models for how communities can accomplish a net-zero society.
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