Estimating plant level energy efficiency with a stochastic frontier
A common distinguishing feature of engineering models is that they explicitly represent best practice technologies, while parametric/ statistical models represent average practice. It is more useful to energy management or goal setting to have a measure of energy performance capable of answering the question, "How close is observed performance from the industry best practice?" This paper presents a parametric/statistical approach to measure best practice. The results show how well a plant performs relative to the industry. A stochastic frontier regression analysis is used to model plant level energy use, separating energy into systematic effects, inefficiency, and random error. One advantage is that physical product mix can be included, avoiding the problem of aggregating output to define a single energy/ output ratio to measure energy intensity. The paper outlines the methods and gives an example of the analysis conducted for a non-public micro-dataset of wet corn milling plants. Copyright © 2008 by the IAEE. All rights reserved.
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Related Subject Headings
- Energy
- 4012 Fluid mechanics and thermal engineering
- 4008 Electrical engineering
- 4004 Chemical engineering
- 1402 Applied Economics
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Energy
- 4012 Fluid mechanics and thermal engineering
- 4008 Electrical engineering
- 4004 Chemical engineering
- 1402 Applied Economics