Broadening to sustainability the perspective of industrial decision-makers on the energy efficiency measures adoption: some empirical evidence

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature. The industry should take further efforts towards increased energy efficiency, that is a major contributor to improve industrial sustainability performance, by implementing energy efficiency measures (EEMs). However, the rate of adoption of these measures is still quite low. Hitherto, EEMs and barriers to their adoption have been evaluated almost exclusively from the viewpoint of energy efficiency decision-makers, not accounting for the broader sustainability perspective. This work aims at understanding whether an industrial sustainability perspective can better address issues related to EEMs adoption, analyzing the question through different viewpoints and insights offered by industrial decision-makers of different industrial sustainability areas within a firm. By doing this, we aim at offering a contribution in the understanding of the low rate of adoption of EEMs. As case studies, we investigated 12 firms from Northern Italy. In comparison to previous literature, results show that an industrial sustainability perspective can better explain the real decision-making process of adopting an EEM. Indeed, people knowledgeable about different industrial sustainability areas may perceive different barriers about the same EEM. EEMs may be negatively affected by reasons related to other areas of industrial sustainability, while positive reciprocal impacts may exist among areas of industrial sustainability; thus, EEMs may have effects on areas other than energy efficiency, and these effects may be perceived only by such areas. The study concludes with some remarks for policy and industrial decision-makers and advice for further research

Ten years of Energy Efficiency: a bibliometric analysis

© 2018, Springer Nature B.V. Energy Efficiency is an international journal dedicated to research topics connected to energy with a focus on end-use efficiency issues. In 2018, the journal celebrates its 10th anniversary. In order to mark it and analyze not only how the journal has been performing over the years, but also which are the trends for academic debate and research in this journal, this article presents a bibliometric overview of the publication and citation structure of the journal during period 2008–2017. The study relies on the Web of Science Core Collection and the Scopus database to collect the bibliographic results. Additionally, the work exploits the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software to map graphically the bibliographic material. The research analyses the most cited papers and the most popular keywords. Moreover, the paper studies how the journal connects with other international journals and identifies the most productive authors, institutions, and countries. The results indicate that the journal has rapidly grown over the years, obtained a merited position in the scientific community, with contributions from authors all over the world (with Europe as the most productive region). Moreover, the journal has focused so far mainly on energy efficiency issues in close relationship with policies and incentives, corporate energy efficiency, consumer behavior, and demand-side management programs, with both industrial, building and transport sectors widely involved. Our discussion concludes with suggested future research avenues, in particular towards coordinated efforts from different disciplines (technical, economic, and sociopsychological ones) to address the emerging energy efficiency challenges

Compressed air systems: Factors affecting the adoption of measures for improved efficiency

© 2018 eceee and the authors, Stockholm. The sustainability and competitiveness of industrial activities may strongly rely on increased energy efficiency. In that, compressed air could be one of the most expensive forms of energy in industry because of its low efficiency. Nonetheless, compressed air is widely used, and is considered as relevant in many facilities, accounting for even more than ten per cent of industrial electricity consumption in the EU, in US and in China. Moreover, it should be noted that the life-cycle cost of a compressed air system is mostly covered by the operating costs, so that most of the measures to lower energy consumption pay for themselves almost immediately, producing relevant monetary savings. Nevertheless, several studies show that the adoption rate of such Energy Efficiency Measures (EEMs) is still low. For this reason, we have carefully reviewed scientific and industrial literature over EEMs for Compressed Air Systems (CAS), so to get useful insights into the main factors leading to their adoption. Our study lays a good foundation for a novel framework aimed at describing and characterising EEMs in CAS, revealing that, so far scientific and industrial literature has mostly presented energy and economic factors, thus giving little room to other factors that still could be quite relevant for an effective EEM adoption, such as compatibility of the measure within the production system (e.g., adaptability to different conditions, presence of different pressure loads), complexity of the production system (e.g., accessibility for operational activities, expertise required for implementation), observability of the performance (e.g., impact on air quality and/or safety). The framework could result in a valuable tool offering different perspectives in the decision-making of industrial managers and technology suppliers, as well as industrial policy-makers

A review of energy efficiency measures within electric motors systems

© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of ICAE2018 The 10th International Conference on Applied Energy. Electric motor systems (EMS) play the lion's share in industrial power consumption. Many opportunities for energy efficiency - most of which apparently cost-effective - can be found, but often decision-makers do not take them as the detail for a specific decision can be too high. In many cases, information regarding the characteristics of such energy efficiency measures (EEMs) is quite vague. For this reason, in the present study we offer a thorough overview of EEMs for EMS, basing on an extensive review of scientific and industrial literature, aimed at offering specific detail over single EEMs and thus support to industrial decision-makers. EEMs are presented according to four main groups, as follows: hardware, motor system drives, management of motors in the plant, and power quality. The new categorization could be helpful to support research for the development of a novel framework to represent the main factors the affect the adoption of EMS for EMS

Only non-energy benefits from the adoption of energy efficiency measures? A novel framework

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Industrial energy efficiency has been widely recognized as a major contributor to the reduction of greenhouse gases emissions and improvement of industrial competitiveness. Nevertheless, a broad set of studies have pointed out the existence of barriers limiting the adoption of promising Energy Efficiency Measures (EEMs). Recently, scholars have shown the relevance of the so-called “non-energy benefits” (NEBs) coming from the adoption of EEMs for overcoming those barriers. Still, the existence of such benefits has been pointed out from specific studies and manuals for practitioners, but an overall framework describing them in terms of savings and benefits, as well as technical and management implications, is missing yet. Moreover, a considerable part of the scholars and of the practitioners just focuses on the identification and definition of the positive benefits deriving from these measures after they have been completely adopted, thus neglecting to describe the full set of both positive and negative effects occurring also during the implementation phase. Thus, starting from a literature review of scientific as well as practitioners’ studies, we have proposed a novel framework and characterization of the relevant items to be considered by an industrial decision-maker when deciding whether to adopt an EEM considering both the implementation and service phases. Hence, by taking this perspective, we have tested and validated the framework and the characterization in a two-step process: firstly, considering a set of EEMs well diffused and adopted in industry; secondly, investigating benefits and losses in ad-hoc selected manufacturing companies. Finally, considerations and implications are drawn from the preliminary validation and suggestion for further research are proposed, for both industrial decision-making as well as policy-making purposes

What factors affect the selection of industrial wastewater treatment configuration?

Industrial wastewater treatment is gaining significance in literature due to stricter environmental policies and increased environmental awareness. The selection of the wastewater configuration encompasses both the treatment as well as several decisions around wastewater collection and disposal pertaining industrial decision-making sphere. However, so far in the wastewater literature, research has mostly discussed either technical features of wastewater technologies, or wastewater policy issues at broader level, without focusing on the industrial decision-making issues and driving factors leading to the selection of a specific configuration. Starting from a literature review, the present study provides an innovative framework of the possible options for wastewater system configuration, as well as major adoption factors by industrial decision-makers. The factors have been classified according to 7 categories, namely: influent-related, technological, economic/financial, internal socio-cultural, external socio-cultural, regulation, site characteristics. The framework, validated with acknowledgeable experts, policy makers and firms, has been preliminarily applied to Italian and Australian food firms. Our investigation reveals that the framework was able to include all relevant problems faced by industries in the selection of a treatment system configuration; besides, the relative importance of factors has been assessed: legal requirements emerge as the most critical factors, followed by volume and discharge fee, the latter particularly interesting for policy makers purposes, since it may guide the decision-making process. Further, the wastewater volume seems to play a key role in our exploratory investigation, with smaller firms preferring a complete off-site treatment to reduce the complexity, whilst larger firms preferring instead more partial or complete on-site treatment configurations for compliance costs reduction. In conclusion, we have provided policy and managerial implications stemming from the study as well as sketched interesting future research avenues

Emergence of Consensus in a Multi-Robot Network: from Abstract Models to Empirical Validation

Consensus dynamics in decentralised multiagent systems are subject to intense studies, and several different models have been proposed and analysed. Among these, the naming game stands out for its simplicity and applicability to a wide range of phenomena and applications, from semiotics to engineering. Despite the wide range of studies available, the implementation of theoretical models in real distributed systems is not always straightforward, as the physical platform imposes several constraints that may have a bearing on the consensus dynamics. In this paper, we investigate the effects of an implementation of the naming game for the kilobot robotic platform, in which we consider concurrent execution of games and physical interferences. Consensus dynamics are analysed in the light of the continuously evolving communication network created by the robots, highlighting how the different regimes crucially depend on the robot density and on their ability to spread widely in the experimental arena. We find that physical interferences reduce the benefits resulting from robot mobility in terms of consensus time, but also result in lower cognitive load for individual agents

Оцінка дії бальзаму "Трускавецький" в складі стандартного бальнеотерапевтичного комплексу на нейро-гормональну регуляцію у дітей шкільного віку

Бальзам "Трускавецкий", включенный в состав стандартного бальнеотерапевтического комплекса (СБТК) курорта Трускавец, у детей без иммунодефицита реверсирует ваготонический эффект СБТК в симпатотонический и снижает уровень кортизола, не влияя существенно на повышенный уровень альдостерона. У детей с иммунодефицитом симпатотонический и кортизолингибиторный эффекты бальзама проявляются менее отчетливо.Balm "Truskavets'kyi", included in structure of standard balneotherapeutic complex (SB&C) of a spa Truskavets', at children without immunodeficiency reverces vagotonic effect of SBTC in sympathotonic also reduces a cortisol level, not influencing essentially on the increased aldosteron level. At children with immunodeficiency sympathotonic and cortisolinhibiting effects of balm are shown less clearly