Benchmarking Energy Intensity

Energy benchmarking defines an intensity measure of process energy performance. It can be used to determine the baseline of energy performance to compare with peers and measure the effects by operation and process changes. 

Energy and Process Optimization for the Process Industries, First Edition. Frank (Xin X.) Zhu. 

Areas for Focus Some of the process units are identified with large performance gaps and these processes can be selected as focus areas. This allows us to effectively concentrate efforts on areas with the greatest potential for improvement. Specialists may need to be assembled to form a project team. 

Update Targets If all major process units are under good performance relative to the targets, the plant may concentrate its efforts on continuous improvements via setting more aggressive targets. 

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Phylipsen, G. J. M., Blok, K., and Worrell, E. (1998). Benchmarking the Energy Efficiency of the Dutch Energy-Intensive Industry, A Preliminary Assessment of the Effects on Energy Consumption and CO2 Emissions, Department of Science, Technology and Society, Utrecht Univeisity, The Netherlands. 

An allocation that is not differentiated between different fuel types (uniform benchmark, output-based) reduces opportunity costs of emitting C02 and thus reduces the impact on the product price. This reduces incentives to substitute less C02-intensive products, e.g. from cement to wood as a building material, or from electricity consumption to investment in energy efficiency but there is not an incentive to keep plants operating above some minimum threshold purely to get allowances. If such output-based updating allowance allocation is differentiated between production processes and fuel types, then additional distortions create an incentive to increase operation of more C02-intensive fuels and production processes. 

These benchmark calculations have also been used to check simplified models that account for the basic energy loss processes without the need of large scale calculations [25,26] and to calculate the probability of multiphoton ionization in the case of intense fs-laser pulses [27]. 

The electronic spectra of the five-membered ring compounds have been intensively studied by the experimental and theoretical works. These molecules are fundamental units in many important biological systems. Furthermore, their excitation spectra are benchmark examples for theoretical studies of molecular excited states [51,55-58]. For furan and thiophene, various types of excitation spectra were measured the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) spectrum, electron energy-loss (EEL) spectrum and magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) spectrum. The SAC-Cl method offered consistent interpretations of these electronic spectra [51-53]. 

In this paper, we start with the ArHCl system. This has become something of a benchmark system in van der Waals spectroscopy. High resolution far-infrared dO and near-infrared spectra have now been measured and this data has been used to produce an accurate potential energy surface for the van der Waals modes. However, our calculations of the spectrum for this system show that there are still new features to be discovered we predicted surprisingly large intensities for the doubly-excited bending modes which were subsequently discovered in near infrared measurements. ... 

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