Building on my earlier note on the Environment-Economy Accounts I will focus on energy consumption by industry over the eleven year period 2010 to 2020.

Energy consumption is measured as gigajoules of energy per thousand dollars of current output, no inflation adjustment. The top five industries will be ranked using 3 metrics , First their most recent consumption level; second by their average 11 year consumption level; and third their delta against their 11 year average to identify the five best performers that reduced consumption the most in gigajoules and the five poorest performers that increased consumption the most in gigajoules. An alternative to measuring best and poorest performance would be be measure performance as the percentage change benchmarked against their 11 year average.

The five highest energy consuming industries if 2020 are listed in Table 1. Industries are identified by their descriptive title and their alphanumeric code in the Input-Output Industry Classification (IOIC) system.

Average energy consumption for all industries in 2020 was 4.69 gigajoules per thousand dollars of production.

The first metric of energy consumption is the actual energy consumption in 2020, the latest year for which data is available. It does not measure current performance it simply establishes the state of the existing industry given its historical business environment management legacy. Both are taken as given and do not indicate the direction of the performance of the industry regarding energy consumption.

The second measure is and indicator of industry’s current performance. It compares the industry’s energy consumption performance in 2020 given its start in 2010. Change reflects its business responses to its changing economic environment. This metric is simply the difference between energy consumption in 2020 from 2010 and can reflect particular economic factors in 2020 compared to 2010. As such is provides information regarding an industry’s relative performance compared to other industries. These industries increased their energy consumption for every thousand dollars of output and as such are the poorest performing industries by this measure over the period.

The third metric attempts to mitigate the anchoring effect of particular circumstances in the start year (usually high or low for unusual circumstances) by comparing 2020 to the industry’s average energy consumption over the eleven year period. Best performing industries post a relative decline in their energy consumption (see Table 3A) and the poorest performing industries post and increase in their energy consumption compared to their own average (see table 3B).