Energy efficiency’s potential to create millions of jobs is particularly important as the world seeks to recover from the effects of Covid‑19 pandemic through economic stimulus. It increases industries’ competitiveness, boosts technological innovation, reduces energy bills, reinforces the security of energy supply, safeguards the environment and helps to limit climate change. This creates a structural effect on industrial energy intensity that is expected to increase in the next few years.Įnergy efficiency has numerous benefits for our societies and economies. Output of less energy-intensive sub-sectors has declined more sharply than the output of the energy-intensive sub-sectors of iron and steel, and cement.
In 2020, the Covid‑19 pandemic pushed down energy use significantly across all industrial sub-sectors. The industry sector, including iron, steel, cement, chemicals and petrochemicals, accounts for over 30% of global total primary energy demand. Global energy efficiency is expected to improve by only 0.8% in 2020, roughly half the rates for 2019 (1.6%) and 2018 (1.5%) and well below the rate of 3% needed to achieve global climate and energy goals.
The Covid‑19 crisis has exacerbated this slowdown by creating liquidity stress and pushing down energy prices, delaying investments in clean and efficient technologies. The rate of global energy efficiency improvement has undergone a worrying slowdown over the last decade. These benefits include creating jobs, enhancing industries’ competitiveness, triggering technological innovation, cutting energy bills, strengthening the security of energy supply, protecting the environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Implementing efficiency measures will help countries to unlock a range of benefits during a time of economic challenges. Digitalisation can create new opportunities for policy makers to capture the untapped energy efficiency potential revealed by global benchmarking. In combination, these measures can boost energy efficiency across the market when they promote installation of energy-efficient equipment, optimisation of production processes through better controls and maintenance, and retrofitting with more energy-efficient and less carbon-intensive technologies. Governments can use a range of policy measures to scale up efficiency investments in key technologies and business solutions in the industry sector, including regulations, incentives and information. International co‑operation will be key to collecting further data and progressively harmonising data collection across countries. Improving the availability, scope and quality of country-level data on energy consumption in industrial sectors could enhance the value of global energy efficiency benchmarking as a tool for policy makers. Policy makers could use this benchmarking to identify major potential for improvement, set and track adequate targets, and promote the sharing of best practices internationally.īenchmarking of processes – comparing their performance to best practices or standard indicators – is a powerful way of gauging whether they have improved. It also shows that countries could further improve efficiency considerably by optimising production processes and implementing best available technologies. Global benchmarking of energy efficiency in the iron and steel sector and the cement sector indicates that many G20 countries have made strong progress.
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