European Foundries and Barriers to Energy Efficiency

Even with the existence of policies to reduce energy consumption, the 20% increase of energy efficiency is going to be missed with current trends. The best energy-efficient technologies and practices are not implemented because of the existence of several barriers. By considering the role of the industrial sector on the total energy consumption, this study addresses the barriers within the European foundry industry, focusing on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This research investigates the main barriers to energy efficiency among 65 enterprises, highlighting the critical problems and difficulties by evaluating the socio-technical framework on which the barriers have been categorized. As results, the greatest perceived barriers are the perception of the lack of resources to be devoted for improving energy efficiency, and the existence of other priorities such as the importance to guarantee the business continuity. Moreover, by looking at firm’s size, small enterprises present a greater perception of the barriers than large ones, mainly due to several barriers that tend to downgrade energy efficiency to a peripheral issue within the operations. In addition to that, the analysis has shown that performing energy audits brings more awareness to the enterprises highlighting the existing difficulties in improving their energy efficiency. This results seems to be relevant as, on the one side, it opens the research to deeper analyse the behavioural barriers and develop the most effective policies to overcome them; on the other side, it has highlighted several issues that SMEs tend to ignore but play an important role when deciding about energy efficiency investments.