Baselining and Benchmarking: Energy Awareness Prompts Efficiency Gains in U.S. Cement Industry

Given the competitive nature of manufacturing, understanding how the performance of plants stack up against one another is important in influencing strategic decisions.  This concept, known as benchmarking, can apply to energy performance, and has proven successful in motivating investment in energy efficiency.

Energy benchmarking is a valuable tool for U.S. manufacturers to evaluate the energy performance of specific cross-cutting systems, or entire plants, against their peers.  Generating energy benchmarks at both the plant- and sector-levels provides important metrics of comparison for plants to gauge their energy performance.  Similarly, benchmarking offers manufacturers hard data to better understand the potential for energy savings in their respective subsectors.  

Over the past decade, a number of initiatives have compiled industrial sector data, both in the U.S. and internationally, to develop energy benchmarks of multiple industrial sectors.  In addition, the recently published international energy management standard, ISO 50001: 2011, requires compliant organizations to establish qualified baselines — a snapshot of energy use — which will serve as the metric against which efficiency performance is measured.

Federal Efforts in the US Show Results for Industry

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ENERGY STAR for Industry program has championed sector-specific energy benchmarks for a number of years.  ENERGY STAR for Industry has worked closely with various stakeholders to develop energy performance indicators (EPI) for ten industrial sectors to date, with additional EPIs expected in the future.  A plant can use these EPIs to determine the energy efficiency of its operations and compare its performance against its sector peers over time.  

For select energy-intensive industries, energy benchmarking has helped drive proactive energy management as a competitive tool.  In a recent report, “Measuring Improvement in the Energy Performance of the U.S. Cement Industry,” released by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, researchers noted an overall 13% reduction in total source energy among the 96 cement plants participating in the ENERGY STAR for Industry program.  

The U.S. Department of Energy Industrial Technologies Program (DOE-ITP) also has two programs that promote industrial baselining at the plant level. DOE-ITP’s Save Energy Now LEADER initiative assigns a technical account manager to help program participants establish energy use and energy intensity baselines to determine their progress in meeting program goals. In another program, Superior Energy Performance (SEP), energy use baselines are generated as an initial step to conform to ISO 50001, a foundational component of the SEP program. SEP participants’ plants will be able to calculate their baselines through an energy management portal that will leverage DOE- ITP energy assessment and software tools, allowing them to track energy data from year to year.

International Industrial Benchmarking Has Big Energy-Saving Potential

Benchmarking initiatives have also been introduced internationally as a strategy to raise awareness of global best practices and to support the uptake of energy -efficient manufacturing technologies and processes.  In 2009, the U.S. Department of State announced the U.S.-China Ten Year Framework for Cooperation on Energy and Environment, including an Energy Efficiency Action Plan, under which the U.S. and China will work to conduct a bilateral analysis of energy efficiency in their energy-intensive industries.  Benchmarking the energy use of these industries will be a core component of the analysis, providing a framework to evaluate individual plant performance.  

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has also been active in its efforts to benchmark energy-intensive industries internationally. However, UNIDO acknowledges that more data needs to be collected to support the initiative’s desired outcomes.  Based on a 2010 working paper outlining the initiative and its progress, UNIDO found that two sectors – Chemicals & Petrochemicals and Iron & Steel – account for approximately half of global industrial energy use.  The study also concluded that energy intensity within these sectors fluctuates widely, suggesting that substantial opportunities exist to improve energy intensity in these sectors’ lowest performers.   Pending additional study, this data can help inform targeted training within select manufacturing subsectors to advance industrial energy efficiency at a global scale.

As benchmarking efforts continue to mature, this data will support an exchange of international best practices on a pre-competitive basis.  For the industrial sector, which accounts for approximately one-third of global energy use, closing the gap between energy-efficient and inefficient manufacturing could have important implications for international energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions.