Life Cycle based Energy Audit
(LiCEA)
Start date: Oct 31, 2012,
End date: Dec 30, 2014
PROJECT
FINISHED
Energy is an essential ingredient in nearly all goods and services, but its use exacts heavy financial, environmental, and security costs. A key method of reducing energy costs while retaining its benefits is to use it more efficiently. Industry is a very large consumer of energy and has unexploited potential for energy savings. To lower the intensity of industrial energy dependency one has to address SMEs. Here, transnational cooperation is vital for connecting partners looking for joint solutions and open new opportunities for companies and improving existing policies. The goal of the LiCEA project, which connects six partners from five central European countries, is to develop and apply smart tools that allow the discovery of numerous unexploited energy saving opportunities in regional industrial clusters along the supply chain of SMEs. Achievements: The LiCEA project started on 1 November 2012 and its core idea is the development of a simplified methodology for energy auditing with the addition of the Life Cycle Assessment analysis, to be used in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) of different clusters (industrial sectors). The project is organized in four main phases: 1. Management and Communication (among partners and with the relevant stakeholder); 2. Definition of guidelines for the application of an energy audit in a life-cycle perspective (based on the state-of-art analysis); 3. Definition and testing of the LiCEA tool; 4. Finalization of the LiCEA Smart tool and demonstration for the wide spread of the tool. The LiCEA website was designed as an interactive tool to promote the project idea but also to collect and share the relevant issues/documents among the stakeholders. The Partners realized a LiCEA stakeholders map that includes SMEs interested in the LiCEA tool development and application, but also other stakeholders as local institutions and associations, energy experts and technology suppliers. The work is based on the long-lasting and broad experience of the energy agency of the regions in energy consulting and the implementaton of energy monitoring and management tools and solutions in order to realize energy audits and energy savings. The Partners analysed the state of the art in industrial energy audit and life cycle assessment, selecting their districts and involving the first enterprises and exchanging information and points of view with similar projects developers. The state-of-art analysis provides a description of the European Directives and standards on industrial energyaudit and Life Cycle Assessment approach (LCA), and their history; a national description of the laws in the partners Countries and a description of the selected clusters (experiences with energy audit and LCA). On this report was delivered the LiCEA Guidance describing the general scheme of the LiCEA audit, that will be applied to analyze the companys production in a simplified way, taking into account both internal processes and the whole life of its products, investigating the supply chain in a LCA perspective. The Guidance allows to allows go beyond the classical energy audit expanding the system boundaries to the entire life-cycle of supply chains of SMEs.
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