The production and use of energy accounts for around 60% of global greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions, providing an intrinsic link between cause and effect. Considering that the manufacturing
industry is responsible for roughly one-third of the global energy demand enforces the need to ensure
that the manufacturing sector continually strives to reduce its reliance on energy and thus minimise
GHG released into the atmosphere. Consequently, efficient management of energy consumption is of
paramount importance for modern manufacturing businesses due to well-documented negative
impact regarding energy generation from fossil fuels and rapidly rising worldwide energy costs. This
has resulted in a proliferation of research in this area which has considered improvements in energy
consuming activities at the enterprise, facility, cell, machine and turret levels. However, there is now a
need to go beyond incremental energy efficiency improvements and take more radical approaches to
reduce energy consumption. It is argued that the largest energy reduction improvements can be
achieved through better design of production systems or by adopting new business strategies that
reduce the reliance of manufacturing businesses on resource consumption. This chapter initially
provides a review of research in energy management (EM) at various manufacturing focus levels. The
inappropriateness of current methods to cater for transformative and radical energy reduction
approaches is discussed. In particular, limitations are found at the business strategy level since no
technique exists to consider the input of these high level decisions on energy consumption. The main
part of the chapter identifies areas of further opportunity in energy management research, and
describes a method to facilitate further reductions in energy use and GHG production in
manufacturing at the business strategy level.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
Greenhouse Gases
Pages
X - X
Citation
WOOLLEY, E. ... et al., 2016. The changing landscape of energy management in manufacturing. IN: Moya,B.L. and Pous, J. (eds). Greenhouse Gases. InTech, Chapter 1.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Publication date
2016
Notes
This is an Open Access article published by InTech and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)