Barriers to and Drivers for Improved Energy Efficiency in the Swedish Aluminium Industry and Aluminium Casting Foundries

Abstract

Industrial energy efficiency is important for reducing CO 2 emissions and could be a competitive advantage for companies because it can reduce costs. However, cost-effective energy efficiency measures are not always implemented because there are barriers inhibiting their implementation. Drivers for energy efficiency could provide means for overcoming these barriers. The aim of this article was to study the importance of different barriers to and drivers for improved energy efficiency in the Swedish aluminium industry and foundries that cast aluminium. Additionally, the perceived usefulness of different information sources on energy efficiency measures was studied. The data were collected through a questionnaire covering 39 barriers and 48 drivers, divided into different categories. Both the aluminium and foundry industries considered technological and economic barriers as the most important categories. The most important category of drivers for the aluminium industry was organisational drivers, while the foundries rated economic drivers as the most important. Colleagues within the company, the company group and sector, and the trade organisation were considered the most useful information sources. Important factors for driving work with improved energy efficiency included access to knowledge within the company, having a culture within the company promoting energy efficiency, and networking within the sector. The policy implications identified included energy labelling of production equipment, the law on energy audit in large companies and subsidy for energy audits in small-and medium-sized companies, voluntary agreements that included long-term energy strategies, increased taxes to improve the cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency measures, and EUs Emission Trading System.The energy efficiency gap is commonly explained by barriers inhibiting the implementation of possible measures [4][5][6][7][8]. Drivers for energy efficiency could provide means for overcoming these barriers, and are therefore interesting to study along with the barriers [5]. Barriers to, and drivers for, improved energy efficiency have been described and categorised in previous research (see e.g., [4,5,7,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]). Barriers to and drivers for improved energy efficiency have been studied in different industry sectors worldwide (see e.g., [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]).Aluminium can be produced either from primary or secondary sources. The production of primary aluminium starts with the mining of aluminium ore, bauxite [34]. Bauxite is refined to aluminium oxide, also called alumina, which is then electrically reduced in the electrolytic process called the Hall-Héroult process to produce pure aluminium [34]. Holding furnaces are used when adding alloying elements to the aluminium [34] to achieve the desired properties of the metal. Secondary aluminium is produced by melting post-consumer scrap [34]. Alloying elements and/or pure aluminium are added to the metal to ensure that the pro...

A methodology for the assessment of multiple benefits of industrial energy efficiency measures

“…Haraldsson and Johansson [28] studied the importance of different barriers and drivers for improved energy efficiency in the Swedish aluminum industry. The data was collected through a questionnaire divided into different categories, covering 39 barriers and 48 drivers..…”

“…Figures 1 and 2 list the most relevant drivers and barriers for the implementation of EEMs as synthesized from three large-scale studies investigating the drivers and barriers in various organizations across Europe [8,9,11]. Comparable drivers and barriers can also be found at Haraldsson and Johansson [28] and Cagno et al [27]. Most of the drivers and barriers from the literature were also stated and confirmed by industry partners in the course of the case studies conducted for this research.…”

An Advanced Decision Support Platform in Energy Management to Increase Energy Efficiency for Small and Medium Enterprises

“…However, the optimization of the operating parameters represents a no-cost strategy which can be implemented by SMEs to achieve real energy efficiency [31,32]. The various barriers encountered in increasing the SMEs' energy efficiency were investigated in [33][34][35][36]. Thus, six most important barriers were identified in [33] for the SMEs belonging to the ferrous material industry, namely, the government energy policy, the financial-economic problem, the managerial-organizational process, the technological factors, the quality of the workforce, the raw material, and the used fuel.…”

The Role of Structural Context in Making Business Sense of Investments for Sustainability–A Case Study

“…However, improving energy efficiency goes beyond the environmental dimension and Epstein and Yuthas [9] (p. 27) highlight becoming more energy efficient as an example of a sustainability choice that is a "no-brainer," due to its financial advantages. Potential cost reductions have also been identified as a top ranked driver for improving energy efficiency [10][11][12][13]. However, it has also been indicated that high initial investments and long payback periods hinder their adoption, e.g., [14,15], as well as lack of time and other priorities, e.g., [10,13,[15][16][17][18][19], and it has been posited that "in the absence of an explicit preference or dedicated budget for climate-change-or energy-related investments, companies tend to prefer investments that enable business growth" [20] (p. 422).…”