TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY OF IMPLEMENTING ENERGY-EFFICIENT TECHNOLOGIES IN INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES

Abstract

Industrial enterprises remain among the largest consumers of primary and electrical energy worldwide, and the gap between technically achievable and actually realized energy savings continues to widen wherever investment decisions rely on simple payback screening alone. This study addresses that gap by proposing an integrated engineering-economic framework — the Energy Efficiency Levelized Cost of Saved Energy (EE-LCSE) model — that couples technical retrofit selection (variable-frequency drives, waste-heat recovery, and process-heat integration) with a discounted, risk-adjusted economic evaluation layer. The framework was tested on a representative energy-intensive production line through comparative modeling of three scenarios: an unmodified baseline, a conventional single-measure retrofit, and the proposed integrated package. Results indicate that the integrated approach reduces specific electricity consumption by 30.3% relative to baseline, yields a levelized cost of saved energy of 27.3 USD/MWh — well below the current industrial tariff — and generates a ten-year net present value nearly triple that of the standard approach, despite a higher initial capital outlay. The findings demonstrate that sequencing and bundling energy-efficient technologies according to marginal cost of conserved energy, rather than adopting them in isolation, materially improves both technical and financial performance, offering a replicable decision-support tool for industrial energy managers and policy designers.