One of EDGE’s partners at Duke is the Center for Globalization, Governance, and Competitiveness (CGGC), led by Dr. Gary Gereffi. Coming out of the research that EDGE and CGGC pursued last year on low carbon competitiveness, we learned about the innovative efforts that companies are pursuing to close the “efficiency gap.” In most companies, there are significant opportunities to improve energy efficiency, and many of them pay for themselves. Nevertheless, organizational, financial, and psychological barriers often prevent companies from capturing these savings. Closing this efficiency gap can have a big payoff for the companies and for society as a whole
To better understand these barriers to efficiency and potential strategies to overcome them, CGGC recently completed a study on industrial energy efficiency. The study, co-authored by Senior Research Analyst Lukas Brun and CGGC’s Director Gary Gereffi, examines why and how manufacturers adopt energy-efficiency improvements in their internal operations and supply chains. The authors explore the actual experience of companies successfully implementing energy-efficiency improvements, and discover that companies choose different pathways to achieve improved energy efficiency in their organizations. The authors also analyze the incentives of companies, and the influence of internal and external actors, to improve the energy efficiency of the product manufacturing process.
The report is available free of charge at: