Energy Efficiency Benchmarking Of Glass Furances

A method for a comparison of data on the specific energy consumption of a large set of glass melting furnaces is presented. This benchmarking of the energy efficiency levels takes the effect of the cullet fraction in the batch into account. The investigated energy consumption data, including electric boosting and oxygen consumption, are normalised to the primary energy equivalent (primary energy consumption of electricity and oxygen generation). A ranking of energy efficiency of about 130 container furnaces has been derived. The difference in specific energy consumption of the most energy efficient container furnaces and the furnace ranging the position 50% is only about 20-25%.