Aldona Kluczek

Assessing Measures of Energy Efficiency Improvement Opportunities in the Industry

Background: Energy efficiency has recently become one of the key aspects in the manufacturing sector. The facilities should improve their performance due to the related economic costs and the significant environmental impacts. The objective of this paper is to prove that energy efficiency of opportunities for energy savings improvements provided by the energy auditors are efficient. These opportunities represent technical actions recommended in the U.S. industrial plants over time period 2013 to 2014. Moreover, these technologies are considered as efficient ones based on energy audits results. Therefore, only ten suggested recommendations are included in the analyses. Methods: The paper demonstrates a DEASlack Based Measurement approach to evaluate the energy efficiency of the recommended technical solutions. This study is built upon the results of energy audits carried out by the author with the Industrial Assessment Center`s experts at the University of Michigan. Results: The results confirms that seven audit`s energy-effective improvements are still efficient, compared with those of the DEA-SBM method outcomes. The paper reveals inefficiencies of three industrial plants, which were considered as efficient ones examined individually in energy audit procedure. Moreover, the results are enriched with the additional analysis of input excesses and output shortfalls. Conclusions: Based on the study of the recommended solutions in the U.S. industrial plants, more effective technologies (DMU2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10) are identified, along with the ranking of the recommended solutions used. The SBM model described in this paper allows a more accurate determination of which audit`s proposed technical improvements are energy efficient or not. Further work is required to develop a set of relative input and output variables as well as a way of variables selection using analytical methods which may make the measure more robust.