Energy efficiency benchmarking system for industrial enterprises

The work describes an energy efficiency benchmarking methodology for a high level monitoring of industrial enterprises in order to fulfill the energy efficiency goals of the federal government in Germany until 2020 and 2050. The applicability of the system is not restricted to Germany. Based on statistical energy consumption data of the industrial sectors in the country according to the NACE-Code classification, energy efficiency can be evaluated on different abstraction levels, resulting in different aggregated indicators. At the same time the approach offers for single industrial enterprises to economically monitor the achieved level of energy efficiency and its development over time. The comparability of different companies is based on company specific reference values as turnover, gross value added and number of employees. Characteristic energy efficiency indicators are determined for the company and set in relationship to the mean values of the corresponding industrial sector. These ratio indicators can be recalculated annually and show if the single company is competitive concerning its energy efficiency level and gain. Because of the explanatory power of the introduced benchmarking approach despite simplicity in survey and interpretation, we suggest to use it as incentive system to reward companies with energy efficiency gains of a certain percentage above average in the industrial sector with lower taxation.