Energy management techniques for small and medium-sized companies

Energy management in the industrial context is an important factor to attain energy savings as well as environmental efficiency. Often, linear regression models quite well represent the consumption of energy carriers and statistical process control (SPC) techniques, such as the cumulative sum (CUSUM) plot and Shewhart-like control charts, are currently applied to identify when a system changes the way energy is consumed. Despite the fact that SPC is widely applied in many fields, there is a lack of published material in energy management. The purpose of this paper is to widen the SPC techniques to be applied to energy management. Particular emphasis is given to small- and medium-sized enterprises since energy data are limited and generally known at system level. The CUSUM of the recursive residuals is proposed as the main tool for the analysis of energy consumption data, both for the historical and the monitoring phases. In addition, tabular CUSUM and EWMA control charts are also included.