Motivation for industry to increase energy efficiency

Panel: Panel 1. Policy, Programs and Program Evaluation

Author:
Uffe Sønderhousen, Confederation of Danish Industries

Abstract

Every sector of society has to join the efforts of increasing energy efficiency and changing to cleaner fuels, but the instruments to ensure this development vary from sector to sector. For almost every company in the manufacturing industry, energy efficiency is a "non-strategic" problem: investments in this area will not help these companies in their competition in the market. Furthermore, for most companies the cost of energy constitutes only a negligible part of the total costs of production. Consequently, many times the companies in the manufacturing industry seem uninterested in investing resources in increasing the energy efficiency. And to make a company decide to invest, the company usually will demand a much better profitability of investments in energy efficiency than of investments in areas of strategic interest to the company. The Confederation of Danish industries has taken a number of initiatives in order to increase the energy efficiency in the manufacturing industry. Most of these initiatives will increase industry's attention to and the knowledge of energy savings. The most important initiative has been to establish rules for energy audits in industry. The energy audits should help the individual company to identity its own specific possibilities of energy savings. Other initiatives are related to whole lines of business. Here demonstration projects are carried out, and companies are invited to take part in working groups that would deal with the exchange of experience from energy savings and energy management within different lines of business.

Some technologies for energy savings are relevant for all lines of business within the manufacturing industry, and for these technologies initiatives are taken to carry out information campaigns on these subjects.