Assessing the relative efficiency of energy use among similar manufacturing industries

Abstract

This article presents a methodology to measure relative industrial energy efficiency across plants within a manufacturing sector through the use of energy-production signatures (EPSs). Linear programming in combination with regression methods, benchmarking and simulation models are used to study the behavior of a representative manufacturing plant. The methodology is validated using data available from the Department of Energy database. The proposed EPSs can be used for proactive benchmarking and diagnostic purposes leading to improvements in energy consumption for individual companies. The results show that the proposed methodology successfully identifies energy and production inefficiencies within a manufacturing segment.

Energy management in production: A novel method to develop key performance indicators for improving energy efficiency

“…Feng and Joung [44] proposed a sustainable manufacturing measurement infrastructure and Tanaka [45] explored different ways to measure energy efficiency performance. Additionally, Aguirre et al [46] proposed metrics called 'energy-production signatures' for diagnosis of energy inefficiencies and benchmarking of energy-related performances of manufacturing plants. Later, Zhou et al [47] developed an approach for monitoring energy efficiency trends over time in a country and for comparing the economy-wide energy efficiency performance among countries.…”

Benchmarking energy performance of industrial small and medium-sized enterprises using an energy efficiency index: Results based on an energy audit policy program

“…Less aggregated benchmarking for manufacturers of aluminium was carried out by Aguirre et al (2010), where an energy-production signature was used. Other studies, such as Boyd (2016), Oh and Hildreth (2014) and Blomberg et al (2012), also adopt a site-level benchmarking approach.…”

Manufacturing productivity and energy efficiency: a stochastic efficiency frontier analysis

“…In order to better understand the energy efficiency in the manufacturing sector, plant-level energy efficiency analysis has received great attention from researchers and engineers [4][5][6][7][8][9]. However, because of the lack of systematic data collection and limited analytics in the manufacturing industry, it has been rare that comprehensive studies of energy efficiency are reported in the literature.…”