A model for the competitive benchmarking of energy costs

Benchmarking is an essential tool for quantifying how a company's energy costs compare with those of competitors and understanding the sources of cost differences, with the ultimate goal of identifying strengths and opportunities for improving performance. The increasing relevance of energy as a factor in competitiveness has heightened interest in managing energy costs. This paper develops an analytical framework for benchmarking the energy cost variance across firms. In this framework, a cost frontier approach allows the decomposition of the observed energy cost gap between two firms, that is, the difference between the unit energy cost of a benchmark producer and the unit energy cost of a target firm. The unit energy cost gap is decomposed into six constituents: (i) energy prices; (ii) non-energy prices; (iii) energy efficiency; (iv) capital intensity; (v) outsourcing level; and (vi) production scale. We illustrate the implementation and usefulness of the proposed model via an empirical application of energy cost benchmarking on a sample of paper manufacturers.