A simplified model of energy performance indicators for sustainable energy management

Abstract

In international management, ISO 50001 has been widely applied in organisations across the world, including Thailand. The main objective of this standard is to continuously and sustainably improve the energy performance of the organisation in order to reduce energy consumption and costs, including alleviating environmental climate change impacts. This standard stipulates the measurement of energy performance improvement using energy performance indicators (EnPIs) and the energy baseline (EnB). This study proposes a simplified model of energy performance indicators (EnPIs), effective for ISO 50001 energy management at organisational level. Appropriate internal benchmarking is proposed for measuring three levels of energy performance, namely organisational, process, and main machine, through energy consumption, intensity, and efficiency. Multiple linear regression was selected to develop energy equations to express the relationship between energy consumption and significantly related variables such as service usage, operating hour, and CDD for business buildings, etc. The proposed EnPIs are applied to measure the energy performance of the case study of business buildings in Thailand complying with ISO 50001. This method can be effectively used to measure changes in the energy performance of the organisation as well as the processes and considered as a comparative alternative to public benchmarking, such as kWh/m2. The findings of this study are considered to be beneficial for every organisation adopting the ISO 50001 system. This proposed method can be effectively used to monitor and measure the organisation's energy performance towards sustainable energy management. However, it still has certain limitations. In the case of energy consumption models that are related to non-linear related variables, it is necessary to conduct further studies to determine more appropriate EnPIs.