September 2008 : Promotion of Benchmarking in Energy Intensive Industries in China
CENTRIC AUSTRIA INTERNATIONAL (CAI) is member of a Chinese-Austrian consortium, which won the tendering of the project Promotion of Benchmarking Tools for Energy Conservation in Energy Intensive Industries. Further members of the project consortium are the Administrative Centre for China’s Agenda 21 (ACCA 21), the China Eco-efficiency Research Center (CERC), the Beijing Energy Conservation and Environment Protection Center (BEEC) and further associate partners and experts.
CAI will provide two of the four designated key experts to the project: Gerhard WEIHS (benchmarking key expert) and XIN Mingy (training key expert).
The service project is financed by the EU-China Energy Environment Programme (EEP) under its Energy Efficiency Component. The overall purpose of this Programme is to promote sustainable energy use by securing supply at improved economic, social and environmental conditions, thus contributing to improved environmental quality and health conditions in China.
The specific purpose of this benchmarking project is to promote benchmarking as a tool for energy conservation in energy intensive industries in China. This project also shall contribute to the Chinese government’s goal to reduce energy consumption per unit GDP by 20 percent over the 11th Five Year Plan’s period (2006-2010).
Industry is the major energy consumer in China, which takes a 70% share of the nation’s entire energy consumption. Energy intensive industry in the key energy consuming industry takes the lion’s share of industrial energy consumption. According to the statistics, the comprehensive energy consumption of the top 1000 enterprises was 670 million ton standard coal in 2004, which accounts to 33% of the national total energy consumption, and 47% of the industrial energy consumption.
These enterprises belong to nine industrial sectors: Iron and steel (263), Chemical (240), Power (132), Oil and petrochemical (100), Building materials (97), Nonferrous Metal (71), Coal (58), Paper and pulp (24) and Textile (23); in total 1008 enterprises
The project will carry out 9 pilot and demonstration studies in the key energy intensive industrial sectors and will develop training and promotion materials for enterprise benchmarking. The technical and economic benefits of the benchmarking methodology will be promoted further to up to 20 energy conservation service providers and other energy intensive industries. Based on the pilot and demonstration projects, a benchmarking tool kit will be developed and disseminated to make this material publicly available. This will be completed by policy recommendations for the Chinese government on how to use benchmarking in a larger scale to mitigate inefficiencies in industrial energy consumption.
The project was started in September 2008 and will last until end of August 2009.