Process oriented industrial classification based on energy intensity

The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code has been used in the United States to categorize manufactured products. This classification is useful for many commercial and business related applications. However, when checked against energy use data collected through the Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) of San Diego State University (SDSU), the energy use profile of the SIC groups showed objectionable deviations within each group, rendering the code less than useful for overall energy based grouping and analyses. In this paper, a Process Oriented Energy Intensity Classification (POEIC) is introduced. When examined with data from about 270 plants of the IAC, this new classification offered more coherent and consistent energy use profile with smaller standard deviation for the selected energy intensity parameters than that of the SIC code.