Comparison of approaches to assessing energy efficiency of technological processes

This paper examines the issues of assessing the energy efficiency of technological processes to ensure sustainable development and rational management of mining enterprises in accordance with international standard ISO 50001. The main idea of the work is a comparative analysis of the traditional approach based on the calculation of specific energy consumption (SEC) values, used by many domestic and foreign enterprises as a key indicator of efficiency, and an approach based on the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods. The rationale for the need to assess energy efficiency is given, taking into account the nonlinearity and stochasticity of technological processes of mining enterprises, as well as the features of the technical and operational characteristics of individual energy-consuming objects and environmental conditions. During the work, the computational experiments were carried out as a case study of production activities of EKG-10 excavators for 2021–2023. Based on the results of the work, the nonlinear relationship between the key parameters of energy efficiency monitoring and the adequacy of the proposed method for solving the problem is proved. The comparative estimates of potential energy losses with different approaches to analyzing the activities of enterprises are presented, showing potential hidden energy losses when using SEC of more than 30% of the total volume. The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, Grant No. 23-11-00197.