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Purpose – The accounting literature has demonstrated increased concern over issues of sustainability. One of the most critical issues that corporations face at the moment is climate change. This especially concerns companies that are substantial consumers of materials and energy. Corporations have increasingly acknowledged that to address this issue the existing ways of managing business must be changed.

This study examines the challenges posed by measurement of energy efficiency performance in an energy-intensive industry. It covers the challenges encountered with respect to the energy efficiency indicator and its use as a management tool.

Methodology – The case study method was used to conduct the research, which took place in a single firm in an energy-intensive process industry.

Findings – The results indicate that the current energy efficiency indicator, specific energy consumption (SEC), does not meet the criteria for good performance measurement. In particular, the controllability of energy efficiency seems problematic. Another major challenge is target setting. Measurable targets are needed to identify and prioritise areas where consumption and emission can be reduced.

Practical implications – The study provides practical knowledge on what is happening in organisations that pursue sustainable development and in particular, environmental efficiency.

Originality/value – Although the conceptual challenges in energy efficiency measurement are well known in the technical literature, discussions dealing with its management have been few in number. This study is a cross-disciplinary work and combines technical energy efficiency literature and management accounting research on performance management.

This study aims to identify sustainability indicators in the energy sector through a literature review and validate them from the perspective and context of professionals working in the sector in an emerging economy country, Brazil, considering the relationship of these indicators with the achievement of the targets set by the United Nations sustainable development goals (UN SDGs).

To accomplish this, a literature review on sustainability indicators specific to the energy sector was conducted. Subsequently, a research instrument (questionnaire) based on the identified indicators was developed and a survey was administered to professionals in the field. The collected data were analyzed using the Lawshe method.

The results revealed 20 indicators, distributed across environmental, economic and social dimensions. Among these, nine indicators were validated, including global impacts, local impacts, renewable energy production as a percentage of total production, greenhouse gas emissions, access to electricity, investment in the energy sector, installed capacity in the electricity sector, energy prices in the end-use sector and energy distribution and conversion efficiency.

Consequently, it was possible to determine which SDGs are directly impacted and provide a foundation for future actions that can contribute to the sustainable advancement of the energy sector in emerging countries.

The aim of the research is to determine the influence of photovoltaic (PV) installation and the share of façade glazing on the energy profile of nursery buildings in the Baltic Sea region, as well as defining the most favorable configuration in terms of energy efficiency.

The article provides comparative calculations of energy performance indicators (Ep, Ed, Eu) and CO₂ emissions (mCO₂) made for the defined model of the nursery. It includes calculations concerning energy performance of the building, depending on its PV power (0–60 kWp), PV efficiency (100 and 85%) and façade glazing ratio (GR = 25%, 50% and 75%).

The results of the research indicate that an increase in the PV power exerts proportional impact on the reduction of the Ep and Ed indicators, as well as on the CO₂ emissions. Only low GR values (25%) reduce the Eu indicator significantly. Decrease in high range of GR values (over 50%) does not provide proportional effects. In the variant: 60 kWp (100% efficiency) with GR = 25%, the biggest share (99.5%) of RES was obtained. This proves that the concept of energy independent nursery buildings is feasible and reasonable in the examined location.

Designing buildings towards environmental neutrality requires laborious pre-design conceptual work before developing the right solutions. The set of results of the relationship between the variables of the building's envelope, energy performance indicators and the required involvement of active RES installations to achieve high energy performance of a building presented in the article is valuable. It allows for a preliminary decision of the direction of the design solutions selection in the design process of public utility buildings, such as nurseries. Thus, it may significantly shorten the pre-design analysis process for the location of the southern part of the Baltic Sea region.

The novelty of the paper relies on examining the dependences between PV power and façade glazing ratio in terms of their influence on energy profile of nursery buildings.

The authors estimate the reduction of electricity poverty in Vietnam. The essential argument is that human development is about subjective feeling as much as technology and income.

The authors use a self-reported satisfaction indicator as complementary to objective indicators based on national household surveys from 2008 to 2018.

In 2010, the fraction of households with access to electricity was over 96%. However, over 24% declared their electricity use did not meet their needs. Since 2014, the satisfaction rate is around 97%, even if 25% of the households used less than 50 kWh/month. Today there is electricity for all in Vietnam, but electricity bills weigh more and more in the budget of households.

The subjective energy poverty measure allows better international statistics: unlike poverty or needs-based criteria, self-assessed satisfaction of needs compares across income levels and climates.

Inequalities in electricity use among Vietnamese households decreased during the 2008–2018 period, but are not greater than inequalities in income, contrary to the findings of Son and Yoon (2020).

Engineering and econometric objectivist approaches dominate the literature on sustainability monitoring. Out of 232 sustainable development goal (SDG) indicators, only two are subjective. Yet the findings show that subjective indicators tell a different part of the story. Access is not grid building, but the meaningful provision of electricity to satisfy the needs.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of monetary policy indicators on Latin America’s renewable energy development. The authors conduct several regressions as well as a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to unveil relationships among possible driving factors among others the current account balance, interest rates, money flow and energy trade balance for Latin America’s energy mix.

The analysis was a two-part process. First, the authors used multiple regression to identify if monetary policy affects the development of renewable energy usage at all. To investigate the singular effects of each of the nine macro-economic variables and four energy indicators, collected from the World Bank (2017) database, several regressions were run where the authors regressed each economic indicator on each energy variable. Then, the authors conducted a principal component analysis with all 13 variables.

The authors found a significant relationship between the clean energy share and governmental spending boosting GDP as well as a significant relationship between governmental spending and the amount of foreign exchange reserves. Declining net energy imports indicate that countries in Latin America are getting more and more energy autonomous for the price of building up huge amounts of foreign exchange reserves.

Renewable energy indicators are not always available for all Latin American countries. Data tend to be scattered. However, sources such as the International Renewable Energy Agency and the World Bank database can be complementary.

The understanding of the effects and impacts of some of the monetary policy related indicators can provide insights for improving renewable energy financing policies. In turn, such policies can have increased influence on renewable energy sustainability and potentially contribute to improving environmental policies.

The specific impact of the selected variables on renewable energy has not been studied. This study attempts to discern the impact of such variables to understand how they influence the renewable energy mix. The insights can in turn inform and modify existing policies and guidelines as well as advise new policy.

Data centers (DCs) are similar to traditional factories in many aspects like response time constraints, limited capacity, and utilization levels. Several indicators have been developed to monitor and compare productivity in manufacturing. However, in DCs most used indicators focus on technical aspects of infrastructure, not efficiency of operations. The purpose of this paper is to rely on operations management to define a commensurate and proportionate DC performance indicator: the energy-efficient utilization indicator (EEUI). EEUI makes objective and comparative assessment of efficiency possible independently of the operating environment and its constraints.

The authors followed a design science approach, which follows the practitioner’s initial steps for finding solutions to business relevant problems prior to theory building. Therefore, this approach fits well with this research, as it is primarily motivated by business and management needs. EEUI combines both the amount of energy consumed by different components and their current energy efficiency (EE). It reaches its highest value when all server components are optimally loaded in EE sense. The authors tested EEUI by collecting data from three scientific DCs and performing controlled laboratory tests.

The results indicate that the optimization of EEUI makes it possible to run computing resources more efficiently. This leads to a higher EE and throughput of the DC while reducing the carbon footprint associated to DC operations. Both energy-related costs and the total cost of ownership are consequently reduced, since the amount of both energy and hardware resources needed decrease, while improving DC sustainability.

In comparison with current DC operations, the results imply that using the EEUI could help increase the EE of DCs. In order to optimize the proposed EEUIs, DC managers and operators should use resource management policies that increase the resource usage variation of the jobs being processed in the same computing resources (e.g. servers).

The paper provides a novel approach to monitor the EE at which computing resources are used. The proposed indicator not only considers the utilization levels at which server components are used but also takes into account their EE and energy proportionality.

This work aims to assess the potential of a Bio-District as a model for applying the circular economy concerning the waste scope. It aims to understand the capability of organic farms to manage waste with a circular perspective, starting with the use of indicators that directly or indirectly impact the waste scope.

This study is based on previous work that identified and systematised the circular indicators of the agri-food sector within a dashboard. With this research as a basis, the indicators within the waste scope in the dashboard were extracted. Cross-linked indicators with an indirect connection to the waste scope were also systematised and tested in a case study. Primary and secondary data were used for the study. The primary data came from a semi-structured interview, and the secondary data were from official databases.

The work highlights two important results. The first allows the definition of a subclassification of indicators by product and organisation, extracting those with a cross-linked characteristic concerning the waste scope. Secondly, the indicators' application shows the farm's circular and waste valorisation potential within the Bio-District. The study also made it possible to test a new indicator, the “Potential Energy Biomass Recovery”, to measure the farm's potential to produce energy from waste.

This research proposes a new circular economy approach to evaluate waste management in the agri-food sector.