Development of a global energy management system for the non-energy intensive multi-site manufacturing organisations

Climate change and energy resource sustainability are both major challenges facing humanity today. Due to their scale, multi-site (and/or multi-national) manufacturing organisations (MMO), are large consumers of energy, typically with industrial bases across the globe to meet market demands. Increasing evidence shows an overall positive link from corporate environmental performance to improved corporate financial performance. This symbiotic relationship needs to be harnessed. Non-energy intensive MMO provide an interesting focus group, representing a novel sector, with the resources, motivation and capacity through corporate social responsibility reporting to positively impact climate change and become leaders in industry with other sectors following suit. To avoid ad-hoc decision-making and improve the effectiveness of capital spending in terms of corporate social responsibility whilst maximizing return on investment it is necessary to develop an approach for assessing projects in an unbiased fashion at a global level. This thesis presents the development and implementation of a novel Global Energy Management System (GEMS) to enable non-energy intensive MMO reach optimal energy efficiency performance whilst meeting corporate energy and carbon emission reduction goals. It outlines the steps at a global level whilst complementing existing ‘site based’ energy management systems. In addressing further gaps identified during the literature review a novel energy management maturity model was developed, providing a global view of the overall network readiness for engaging in energy efficiency. The thesis further contributes to closing the energy efficiency gap by addressing the formulation of a long-term energy policy and associated strategy based on best practice. It culminates with a systematic, repeatable and scalable decision support framework, underpinned by a multi-criteria decision-making methodology that uses economic, environmental, social and technical criteria. The GEMS methodology was applied to a Fortune 500 non- energy intensive MMO and global leader in the medical device sector – Boston Scientific Corporation. The results include a company commitment to carbon neutrality with unpresented levels of capital invested into energy efficiency projects. It is now the corner stone of BSC’s approach to energy management both at a site level and corporate level. GEMS is well and truly engrained into the BSC culture and is front and centre to any energy related sustainability discussions within BSC and with external stakeholders.

Publisher

NUI Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland

cbn

Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)