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Abstract
Improving energy efficiency is imperative to enhance the competitiveness of today’s manufacturing. The potential opportunities for improving the energy efficiency need to be systematically identified at a factory level since it is strategically a significant unit for energy management. One approach for determining improvement strategies is to derive references or targets through benchmarking. Energy benchmarking requires energy characterisation to determine the current performance and benchmark to determine improvement potentials. However, an inadequate development has been observed for factory level application. The present developments in energy characterisation and benchmarking of factories are found either imprecise to determine the potential exists for improvement or complex to implement it as a generic method. It is necessary to develop a methodology for characterising and benchmarking energy consumption that can provide indicative measures for improvement in and is replicable across factories.
In this study, exergy analysis has been used to theorise a concept for characterising energy consumption by a factory level generic parameter and benchmarking it using a derived empirical reference. The concept is used to develop an appropriate empirical method of energy characterisation based on the operational best practices of the factory. The method has been tested by applying to an industrial case suitable for synthesising exergy analysis to verify the reference. In other industry applications, the method has been tested for different scopes to validate its reliability for further deployment. Finally, energy efficiency improvement studies using the benchmarking method have been performed for industry cases. These studies show that broad and indicative opportunities to improve energy efficiency can easily be estimated using the methodology.