Energy efficiency projects deliver! An analysis of 6,500 industrial energy efficiency projects

The success of energy efficiency projects is often reported on an anecdotal basis relying on successful case studies. That information is important, in particular to show technological progress. Still, those highlight projects do not represent the vast majority of energy efficiency projects implemented by the market. Within the publicly available database DEEP, technological and economic data from over 10,000 energy efficiency projects has been collected by a project consortium on behalf of the European Commission. Half of them are production related industry projects. The other half comprises building projects of which a third has been implemented in the industry, too. The database covers projects from the European Union as well as the United States. In our paper, we will present an analysis of the industrial projects in the DEEP database, showing payback, avoidance costs and savings of the implemented energy efficiency measures. We will consider influencing factors such as company size, sector, type of measure and country. With our analysis, we can show in detail that cost-efficient measures exist for a broad technological scope.