Assessing and Improving Compressed Air Systems' Energy Efficiency in Production and use: Findings from an Explorative Study in Large and Energy-intensive Industrial Firms

Compressed Air Systems (CAS) are one of the most common and energy intensive utilities in industry, representing up to 10% of the industrial energy needs. Nevertheless, benchmarks currently available are usually based on nominal data and referred to the quality of the design, while there are still no available benchmarks based on measured industrial data, taking into consideration actual operating conditions, and referred to compressed air production and, most of all, use. In accordance with the Italian transposition of the European Directive 2012/27/EU (i.e. Legislative Decree 102/2014) large and energy-intensive enterprises have been asked to perform mandatory energy audits in 2015. In this context, a data collection focused on CAS has been carried out by means of a semi-structured questionnaire in the form of a spreadsheet. First data analyses performed and relative findings are here illustrated, together with the next steps for the creation of reliable sectorial and cross-sectorial benchmarks. © 2017 The Authors.