Plant Energy Benchmarking: A Ten Year Retrospective of the ENERGY STAR Energy Performace Indicators (ES-EPI)

Abstract

Over the past several years, there has been growing interest among policy makers and others in the role that benchmarking industrial energy efficiency can play in climate, air, and other potential regulatory actives. For over ten years, the US EPA has supported the development of sector specific industrial energy efficiency benchmarks, known as ENERGY STAR Energy Performance Indicators (ES-EPI). To date there are ES-EPI that are either completed or under development for fourteen broad industries. Within these industries, ES-EPI account for over two dozen sub-sectors and many more detailed product types. Newer versions, or updates for three of the industries' ES-EPI have been developed in recent years. Through the process of updating this ES-EPI, the program has been able to observe changes in the energy performance of the sector as well as the range in performance found in the sector. This paper provides an overview of the approach that has been used in this research to develop this ES-EPI; summarizing the industry specific and general findings regarding the range of performance within and across industries. Observations about industrial plant benchmarking and lessons learned will be explored. In general, there are no sectors that are easily represented by a simple energy per widget benchmark; less energy intensive sectors tend to exhibit a wider range of performance than energy intensive ones; changes over time in the level and range of energy performance, i.e. industry curve shift, for ES-EPI that have been updated do not reveal any single pattern.