دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی اثربخشی حسابرسی های انرژی در سازمان های کسب و کار کوچک - الزویر 2017

Abstract

Energy audits for business organizations have been promoted for more than four decades, but no evaluation based on the counterfactual behaviour of a comparable large control group has yet been carried out. Seeking to close this gap, this paper analyses the effect of a German energy audit programme involving more than 1,400 small manufacturing and non-manufacturing organizations. The control group observations were drawn from a parallel study involving more than 2,000 organizations. Limiting the sample to business organizations with at most 50 employees, the study employs coarsened exact matching, and—as a robustness check— conventional propensity scores as well as distance-based matching to estimate the effectiveness of simple and detailed audits on the adoption of four ancillary energy efficiency measures. The findings suggest that both types of audits spur the adoption of lighting, insulation, heating systems, and operational measures to improve heating systems (operations) by between 10 and 20 percentage points. Audit effectiveness was highest for insulation measures and operations. In addition, the findings suggest a positive but diminishing interaction between audit effectiveness and organization size for lighting, insulation and operations. These results are robust across alternative matching methods.

Conclusions

Employing coarsened exact matching, we found that the German energy audit programme accelerated adoption of energy efficiency measures in small business organizations. While the few earlier studies evaluating the effects of energy audits on organizations’ adoption of energy efficient technologies rely on the subjective responses of participating organizations and do not employ control groups, our findings provide more robust evidence pertaining to the effectiveness of energy audits. The percentage increase in adoption in response to energy audits varied across the four types of ancillary measures analysed. The effect was strongest for insulation, i.e., the measure with the highest upfront costs, and for operations, arguably the most likely of the four measures to be overlooked by non-energy experts. Since these measures are related also to particularly high energy savings, our findings suggest that cost-efficient energy audits in small organizations should focus on—among the measures considered in this study—insulation measures and measures optimizing heating system operations. On the other hand, evaluations based on ‘the number of additional measures induced by an energy audit’ as an indicator of programme effectiveness (e.g., Fleiter et al., 2012b) could be misleading since, implicitly, they assume audits to be equally effective across measures. In general, for the four measures considered we find no strong evidence that detailed audits are more effective than simple audits. This result may be explained by the fact that these measures are relatively simple ancillary measures, which are typically identified and analysed in simple audits. For more complex core-production measures, we expect detailed audits to be more effective than simple audits.