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Abstract: Industrial energy programs such as energy audit programs and long-term agreements (LTAs) are one of the most common means of promoting energy efficiency in industry. As a result of the European Energy End-Use Efficiency and Energy Services Directive from 2006, the Swedish Government Bill proposed a national energy program towards industrial small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using more than 500MWh energy annually. The aim of this paper is to present the structure and design of the program, adopted in 2010, the logics in brief behind the structure, as well as an ex-ante evaluation of the program’s cost-effectiveness. The paper is aimed towards the part of the program involving industry, i.e. not the part involving companies within service and sales etc. The proposed design primarily includes a subsidized energy audit with some minor LTA-elements, such as the need to report results from the energy audit, to present a plan over which measures to conduct, and after three years present which measures that were implemented. The ex-ante evaluation of the program shows a cost-effectiveness of 0.25–0.50Eurocents/kWh, yielding savings of about 700–1 400GWh annually. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to conceptually analyze the cost-effectiveness of voluntary energy efficiency programs targeted at the industrial sector. In the paper a broad methodological framework for such an assessment is outlined, and this is applied empirically to discuss the potential cost-effectiveness of the ongoing Swedish energy efficiency program PFE. The focus lies on the presence of asymmetric information and bounded rationality, and the paper discusses how these factors may influence the cost-effectiveness of these types of programs. We also highlight the impact of the self-selection mechanism on the program''s cost-effectiveness. The results show that the presence of information inefficiencies and asymmetries represents one of the major motives for policy intervention in the industrial energy efficiency field, but the substitution of energy management systems for electricity taxes—such as that achieved in the Swedish PFE program—does not necessarily address these asymmetries entirely cost-effectively. First, the presence of firm-government information asymmetries implies that electricity taxes could do a better job in energy-intensive companies while an energy management system could be more effective in companies with a low energy-intensive production process due to the lack of prior experience of energy efficiency measures. The current set-up of PFE induces the reverse situation. Second, although firm-internal information asymmetries may well exist in the participating energy-intensive companies—implying that energy management systems could do a good job in detecting cost-effective measures—this is likely to be even more true for the non-participating companies (again due to their comparatively low accumulated knowledge in the energy efficiency field). It should however also be acknowledged that this analysis is static, and in the long-run voluntary energy efficiency programs may lead to significant learning impacts and—given the public good characteristics of this new knowledge—to important spillover effects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents the Energy, Carbon and Cost Assessment for Building Stocks (ECCABS) model, which is a bottom-up model to assess energy-saving measures (ESM) and carbon dioxide (CO2) mitigation strategies in building stocks. The model is based on a one-zone hourly heat balance that calculates the net energy demand for a number of buildings representative of the building stock and an additional code for the input and output data. The model generates results in terms of net and delivered energy, associated CO2 emissions, and the costs of implementing different ESM. The results are extended to the entire building stock by means of weighting factors. Empirical and comparative validations of the heat-balance modelling of single buildings are presented. The building stock modelling is validated against the current Swedish residential stock, for which the results of the modelling are in agreement with the statistical data. Using the model to assess a number of ESM reveals that the energy usage of the Swedish residential sector can be reduced by 55% and the associated CO2 emissions can be reduced by 63%, with most of the ESM being cost–effective. The applicability of the model to countries other than Sweden is under investigation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]