Industrial energy efficiency: A look at the data

Abstract

It is extremely difficult to make a precise, quantitative assessment of the impact of the myriad of factors affecting the improvement in industrial energy efficiency. It is certainly not correct to conclude that housekeeping measures alone have led to the observed improvement. Changing product mix among four digit SIC industries within the same two digit classification, variations in capacity utilization (returns to scale) and energy price increases as well as technological innovations have all contributed to part of the realized reduction in energy use per dollar value added over the period of investigation. Unfortunately, data limitations as well as modeling weaknesses prohibit an exact delineation of the impact of each of the factors on the increase in energy efficiency. The best that can be done—and quite convincingly so—is to qualitatively show that unequivocally these factors had an impact on the efficiency with which energy was used in the manufacturing process for the ten most energy intensive industries in the period 1971–1976.