Developing an aggregate metric to measure and benchmarking energy performance

Abstract

As key elements of energy planning, ISO 50001 recommended inter alia identifying appropriateindicators to monitor and measure energy performance. Benchmarking can be a helpful tool toestablish energy efficiency or performance indicators. While we agree that is hard to get anabsolutely universal indicator aggregating several physical indicators defined in differing units; itis however possible to expand the area of cases covered or improve its characteristics such asaccuracy, representativeness and simplicity. In this paper, we developed an aggregateddimensionless “Indicator for Energy Benchmarking” (IEB) to enhance the range of models ofindicators dedicated to the engineering field. The systems targeted are low and middle levelsystems of the energy indicators pyramid. We built the proposed indicator based on specificcharacteristics: process decomposition-oriented, increasing when energy consumption decreases,dimensionless, with limited threshold value to 1. Consequently, the indicator provides manyadvantages in comparison to simple metrics and complex indicators such as: direct detection ofenergy use failure processes, creating interdependence between benchmarked systems scores, noneed for data history to start benchmarking of a multisystem. IEB can be implemented as anintegral part of many energy management or energy efficiency standards, methodologies or toolssuch as EN 16231:2012 and ISO 50001:2018. In last section, we calculate the indicator for2 central sterile service departments of 2 university hospitals in Morocco to show its potential andoperating mode.