Economic, Exergy, and Environmental Analyses of the Energy Assessments for US Industries

This paper highlights the expected versus actual outcomes of 152 energy analyses that were performed between 2011 and 2020. The 1,317 energy assessment recommendations (ARs) are grouped into eight categories. This study adopted four measures per category: annual electricity savings, annual gas savings, annual cost savings, and annual CO2 emission reduction. The first part of the analysis compares the expected recommendations to each measure's actually implemented values for the eight categories. It was found that the percentages of the actual to the expected electricity, gas, and cost savings are 26.6%, 11.4%, and 17.1%, respectively. In contrast, the percentage of the actual to the expected CO2 reduction is 22%. Moreover, the second part of the analysis presents each category's implementation rate and the reasons for rejecting the unimplemented ARs. Cash flow and expensive initial investment resulted in rejecting 25% of ARs. Finally, the study proposes techniques and strategies to increase ARs' implementation rate and improve all private energy services industries' implementation rate. An exergy analysis is added to show the improvement that energy assessment achieves regarding exergy and exergy efficiencies of different industrial applications.