An energy-led sustainability assessment of production systems – An approach for improving energy efficiency performance

Aldona Kluczek

International Journal of Production Economics, 2019, vol. 216, issue C, 190-203

Abstract: Currently growing concerns about energy efficiency and sustainability across the manufacturing sector have spurred researchers to spend their efforts on improving energy efficiency. A recent study on sustainability assessment does not provide any real measurement linkages between energy matters and sustainability dimensions at the plant level. Simultaneously, a few papers that deal with technologies, not taking the sustainability associated with optimized energy intensity as a whole into account, still attempt to include LCA-based methods into the integrated sustainability methods. Thus, an energy-led approach for sustainability assessment is adopted using all-in-one methodology: SBM-DEA + energy LCA-LCC-SLCA. In accordance with the goal of the article, this approach will be performed by improving the energy efficiency of twelve production systems. This sustainability-oriented methodology is presented in the form of relative, aggregated sustainability indicators for production systems, IESUS, comparing quantitatively two scenarios: a baseline and a future scenario. The overall results in sustainability terms show, that improving the energy efficiency of production systems contributes significantly to energy sustainability. For the improvement scenario, the indicator amounts to IESUS = (2.565; 2.475; 2.264) compared with IESUS = (1.450; 2.937; 2.368) as baseline. This sustainable-oriented methodology will enable the implementation of a suitable performance measurement tool for supporting industrial energy policy-makers. If followed, the approach will allow for the improvement of energy-intensive manufacturer-dependent performance, guiding it towards energy sustainability. The robustness of the results is guaranteed by a sensitivity analysis.

Keywords: Energy-led assessment; Energy efficiency; Life cycle-based approach assessment; Production systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527319301392
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:proeco:v:216:y:2019:i:c:p:190-203

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2019.04.016

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Production Economics is currently edited by Stefan Minner

More articles in International Journal of Production Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().