مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اثربخشی حسابرسی های انرژی در سازمان های کسب و کار کوچک – الزویر 2017

Energy audits for business organizations have been promoted for more than four decades, but no evaluation based on the counterfactual behaviour of a comparable large control group has yet been carried out. Seeking to close this gap, this paper analyses the effect of a German energy audit programme involving more than 1,400 small manufacturing and non-manufacturing organizations. The control group observations were drawn from a parallel study involving more than 2,000 organizations. Limiting the sample to business organizations with at most 50 employees, the study employs coarsened exact matching, and—as a robustness check— conventional propensity scores as well as distance-based matching to estimate the effectiveness of simple and detailed audits on the adoption of four ancillary energy efficiency measures. The findings suggest that both types of audits spur the adoption of lighting, insulation, heating systems, and operational measures to improve heating systems (operations) by between 10 and 20 percentage points. Audit effectiveness was highest for insulation measures and operations. In addition, the findings suggest a positive but diminishing interaction between audit effectiveness and organization size for lighting, insulation and operations. These results are robust across alternative matching methods.

Introduction

In response to the first oil crisis in the 1970s several industrialized countries implemented energy audit programmes for industry. Currently, it is estimated that there are more than 100 audit programmes in place worldwide (Price and Lu, 2011), typically involving governmentfunded subsidies. As of 2015, the European Union (EU) Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27 requires business organizations that are not small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to carry out energy audits at least once every four years. Although such audits are not obligatory for SMEs, EU member states are required to encourage SMEs to carry them out. The ultimate aim of energy audits is to overcome information-related barriers to energy efficiency (e.g., Anderson and Newell, 2004; Schleich, 2004). Better information about technology options and related energy cost savings is expected to accelerate the adoption of energy efficiency measures. Information-related barriers have been found to be prevalent in smaller organizations in particular (e.g. Schleich and Gruber, 2008; Schleich, 2009), providing a rationale for many government programmes to focus on SMEs. Despite the popularity of energy audits, little is known about their effectiveness. Methodological challenges involved in accurately measuring the effectiveness of audits include, in particular, sample selection bias, which would result if companies that adopt lowcost energy efficiency measures are more likely to participate in subsidized energy audits. Moreover, some companies have implemented energy efficiency measures in the absence of audits. Unless these factors are properly accounted for in policy evaluation, sample selection would likely lead to overestimating policy effectiveness (e.g. Joskow and Marron, 1992). So far, only a few studies have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of energy audit programmes that involve technology adoption.1 Typically, these studies rely on subjective assessments that are collected via surveys (e.g. Thollander et al., 2007; Fleiter et al., 2012a,b; Backlund and Thollander, 2015; Paramonova and Thollander, 2016) and, therefore, are prone to social desirability bias. To the best of our knowledge, no extant evaluations of energy audits for companies have relied on comparison with a control group. Apart from the costs involved in conducting such an evaluation, assembling a control group of comparable companies and measures is challenging in practice. 2 In addition, control groups need to be sufficiently large to allow for statistical analyses. In our study we seek to close this gap.