A Maturity Model for Energy Management

June 3, 2014

Energy management is becoming a priority as organizations strive to reduce energy costs, conform to regulatory requirements, and improve their corporate image. Despite the upsurge of interest in energy management standards, a gap persists between energy management literature and current implementation practices. This gap can be traced to the lack of an incremental improvement roadmap. In order to close this gap, we propose an Energy Management Maturity Model that can be used to guide organizations in their energy management implementation efforts and to incrementally achieve compliance with energy management standards, such as ISO 50001. The proposed maturity model is inspired on the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle approach for continual improvement, and covers well-understood fundamental energy management activities common across several energy management texts. We evaluate our proposal by combining the following methods: (i) the use of a questionnaire in energy management related groups to assess the model’s utility, according to industry experts; (ii) mapping between ISO 50001 and our maturity model, in order to assess whether it can be used to help ISO 50001 implementation; (iii) evaluate the achieved mapping using Wand and Weber’s method to identify ontological deficiencies. Our proposal helps organizations gradually implement energy management efforts with a well known set of activities and helps them achieve compliance with ISO 50001, the latest energy management systems standard, providing them financial and consumer image benefits.

Authors in the community:

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  P

  Pedro Miguel Barata Antunes

  ist157386

Supervisors of this institution:

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  M

  Miguel Mira da Silva

  ist13948

• 

  P

  Paulo Jorge Fernandes Carreira

  ist24950

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico