Johan Couder

Towards an Integrated Performance Indicator for (Energy) Benchmarking Covenants with Industry

Voluntary approaches play an important role in reducing industrial energy use and CO2-emissions. Benchmarking can provide a starting point for negotiating targets, and are an added value to a monitoring program. Indicators are perfect for identifying the performance gaps, and to track performance over time. However, indicators at the firm level are still characterized by a low degree of standardization. Lack of comparability makes benchmarking very difficult. Indicators measure changes in one aspect (e.g. energy use) as if they were completely independent of changes in other aspects (e.g. waste generation). We argue that integrated indicators, based on micro-economic productivity theory, may one day assume the role of certified tools in the field of flexible policy instruments.