Benchmarking energy performance of industrial small and medium-sized enterprises

Panel: 3. Energy management: the nuts and bolts

Authors:
Elias Andersson, Department of Management and Engineering / Energy Systems at Linköping University, Sweden
Oskar Arfwidsson

Abstract

There is a large energy saving potential through energy efficiency measures in industrial SMEs which is not fully utilized, partly since smaller companies generally do not have the same amount of resources as larger industrial companies usually have for energy management. To address this, industrial SMEs needs tools to continuously and systematically work with energy efficiency. One way is to be able to benchmark their energy performance and energy end-use with competitors. This can be enabled by the creation of an energy efficiency index (EEI), where single industry’s energy end-using processes can be benchmarked against other industrial companies in the same sector and thereby identifying appropriate energy efficiency measures. The aim of this study was to present a method of how an effective and useful EEI can be calculated for industrial company’s energy performance and energy end-use processes, which also included a proposal of a categorization of these processes. The EEI creates possibilities for benchmarking between industrial companies, which facilitates the identification of cost-effective energy efficiency measures. The method for this study was as follows: a literature study was made of how benchmarking of energy performance and energy end-use processes in industry have been carried out internationally, along with supplementary interviews with government agencies and energy auditing companies that have insight into companies' work with energy efficiency. Based on the literature and the interview study, a method was proposed of how to calculate an EEI. This method was then applied on real energy data from industrial SMEs, namely sawmills who participated in the Swedish Energy Audit Program (SEAP). The application of the proposed method for calculation of EEI was validated by comparing the EEI values to the energy efficiency potential for each company, where a value on EEI that indicate high energy usage should correlate to a high energy efficiency potential and vice versa. The result from the literature and interview study showed that multiple ways of approaches for data analysis and benchmarking of energy efficiency performance exists. In many cases data availability is scarce and quality of data is questionable. This complicates the creation of an EEI. Therefore, in order to create and maintain an EEI, energy audits must categorize the production and support processes in industry in a harmonized and uniform way. The proposed method allows the calculation of an EEI that is based on a pre-defined categorization of energy end-use in an industrial site. This allows benchmarking of these categories as well as the entire industrial sites energy performance. The categorization of sawmills energy end-use processes was inspired by a categorization made by SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden. As it turned out, an EEI was possible to calculate for 11 of a total of 31 participating sawmills, furthering highlighting the importance of quality assured energy audits and energy data. Validation of the developed method showed a correlation between EEI value and energy efficiency potential, although this correlation appeared first after quality control and revising of the sawmills energy data through studies of the energy audit reports. This indicates that the EEI calculated with the proposed method has potential for identifying energy efficiency measures, but requires quality assured data as well as a harmonized categorization of energy end-use processes. To strengthen the reliability of the results, the method should be tested on additional industrial sectors and further quality assurance of the data should be conducted for these sectors.