An energy-led sustainability assessment of production systems – An approach for improving energy efficiency performance

Currently growing concerns about energy efficiency and sustainability across the manufacturing sector have spurred researchers to spend their efforts on improving energy efficiency. A recent study on sustainability assessment does not provide any real measurement linkages between energy matters and sustainability dimensions at the plant level. Simultaneously, a few papers that deal with technologies, not taking the sustainability associated with optimized energy intensity as a whole into account, still attempt to include LCA-based methods into the integrated sustainability methods. Thus, an energy-led approach for sustainability assessment is adopted using all-in-one methodology: SBM-DEA + energy LCA-LCC-SLCA. In accordance with the goal of the article, this approach will be performed by improving the energy efficiency of twelve production systems. This sustainability-oriented methodology is presented in the form of relative, aggregated sustainability indicators for production systems, IESUS, comparing quantitatively two scenarios: a baseline and a future scenario. The overall results in sustainability terms show, that improving the energy efficiency of production systems contributes significantly to energy sustainability. For the improvement scenario, the indicator amounts to IESUS = (2.565; 2.475; 2.264) compared with IESUS = (1.450; 2.937; 2.368) as baseline. This sustainable-oriented methodology will enable the implementation of a suitable performance measurement tool for supporting industrial energy policy-makers. If followed, the approach will allow for the improvement of energy-intensive manufacturer-dependent performance, guiding it towards energy sustainability. The robustness of the results is guaranteed by a sensitivity analysis.