Enabling Energy Management for Planning Energy-Efficient Factories

Due to the reasons of sustainability, energy efficiency becomes a more and more important objective for industrial companies. Among others, the term "energy management" is often mentioned as a practical instrument to raise energy efficiency. Because of the long-term influence at an early stage of the factory life cycle, factory planning provides an important contribution to realize company goals regarding energy efficiency. Until now, there is a lack of methodical concepts considering the combination of energy management and factory planning. In this paper, the interaction between both of these topics is described and by this, the meaning of energy management as an integral part of energy-efficient factories is underlined. Generally, energy management is used in the phase of factory operation to improve the energy performance, including energy efficiency, energy supply security, energy use and energy consumption. Besides, the integration of energy-related tasks in the factory planning process should also be realized as far as possible, e.g. regarding the purchase, distribution, storage and use of energy. This leads to a more systematic and holistic consideration of energy efficiency in organizational and technical processes of a company. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.