Reducing the energy consumption of Indian iron and steel industry through enhancing energy efficiency: Role of regional coordination

Abstract

This article aims at estimating the energy efficiency of the iron and steel industry in production theoretic approach. Taking a regional perspective, we have done a meta-frontier analysis combined with the slack-based measure of data envelopment analysis (DEA). The results depict huge energy efficiency gap exists across four regions. The northern region is the best performer under group frontier than meta-frontier DEA. South and west regions are relatively well-performed under meta-frontier than group frontier while the eastern region performs moderately well under both frontiers. The results show the significant energy efficiency improvement opportunities available across regions can be realised through technological advancement and energy management.