Renewable Energy

Energy Culture – Improving industrial energy efficiency through behavioral change

Research suggests that there remains an important potential to reduce energy consumption in energy intensive industry by 15-25%. Energy management and behavioral changes can achieve up to half of this remaining energy efficiency potential. At the same time, energy management systems have in some cases failed to produce the systematic energy performance improvements that should be observed. In our work we have identified a companys Energy Culture as a key factor in this regard. Our definition of Energy Culture is the shared mindset that creates and sustains an environment conducive to continual improvement of the energy performance of an organization. It comprises people, systems, structure, skills and and strategy. This is based on a long history of work on Safety Culture, successful energy optimization project implementations in industry, continuous improvement methodologies and methodologies as well as methodologies for leading change. The continuous improvement philosophy serves as basis for the approach and the different phases of a project are shown in Figure 1. and is shown in figure 1.