Practical and verifiable quantification of energy consumption in large industries for energy reporting and incentive applications

The South African government has introduced regulations with the aim to monitor and reduce carbon emissions. Energy efficiency tax incentives and future compulsory Department of Energy reporting are reviewed in this paper. These regulations require verifiable data for energy consumption to determine energy savings. Steel production plants are large, integrated and complex energy consumers; errors in quantification can therefore be considerable. Research has shown that current quantification techniques use data from disorganised, decentralised and unverifiable sources and collecting procedures. The need therefore exists to improve the quality of the steel plants' energy reporting and quantification of energy consumption. In this paper, a methodology is developed to quantify energy consumption on a steel plant. The methodology is presented as a step by step approach. The steps consists of identifying-, normalising-and quantifying the energy carriers on a plant. The methodology also includes verification steps from literature. The methodology compiled in the study is validated on steel production organisations with facilities based in South Africa. The results are compared with previous quantification results published. Differences in the estimation of energy carriers range from 2%-10% for three case studies. The main reason for the differences is that previous quantification methods use untraceable assumptions.