Investments in Energy Efficiency with Variable Demand: SEC’s Shifting or Flattening?

Abstract

In order to support energy efficiency improvement, it is essential to monitor the energy performance and to make benchmarking with similar process or related Best Available Techniques. Among different key performance indicators that compare similar processes, the most relevant for the industrial sector is the specific energy consumption (SEC). With regard to the energy demand in an industrial process, a variable and fixed portion can generally be distinguished: as a direct consequence the amount of energy used per unit of product (SEC) usually decreases while the production rate increases. It should be noted that often production processes face variable demand over their utilization. Aim of this work is to propose a novel decision model to support the identification of the more suitable investment in energy efficiency given the variable demand expected, explicitly considering that the effect of investments in energy efficiency can be categorized in two main categories: those shifting the SEC curve and those flattening the SEC curve.

Stimulating Investments in Energy Efficiency Through Supply Chain Integration

“…In the last decades, research streams on energy efficiency in the industrial sector have been widely developed, highlighting the relevance of the topic in real application and some relevant literature reviews have been produced,-for example, Marchi and Zanoni [7] proposed a systematic review of papers focused on the integration of energy efficiency in supply chain design and management; Biel and Glock [18] analysed the decision support models that integrate energy aspects into the mid-term and short-term production planning of manufacturing companies; Schulze et al [19] provided a systematic review of existing academic journal publications on energy management in industry; Tanaka [20] developed a contextual framework for policy analysis for enhancing energy efficiency and conservation in industry; Pons et al [21] defined a map of the adopted technologies for the reduction of energy consumption in production and related them to the performances of manufacturing firms, while Abdelaziz et al [22] presented a comprehensive literature review about industrial energy saving by management, technologies and policies. In addition, some other interesting works on investment in industrial energy efficiency are the one of Blomqvist and Thollander, [23], that presented a dataset integrating energy efficiency data from Sweden and USA in order to overcome information barriers and the one of Marchi and Zanoni, [24], which quantitatively analysed the effects that different types of investments have on the energy performances when the demand is variable. Later, Marchi et al [25] analysed the effects on energy efficiency of the integration of the decision-making process concerning operations and heat recovery opportunities for a single-vendor single-buyer supply chain; while, Bazan et al [26] presents a two-level closed-loop supply chain model with two coordination policies (classical and Vendor Managed Inventory with the Consignment Stock agreement, VMI-CS) considering two critical environmental issues, that is, the energy used in production processes and the GHG emissions from production and transportation activities.…”