Strategic Approaches to Energy Efficiency Enhancement in Manufacturing: A Systematic Review and Integrative Meta-Synthesis

Abstract

Background: Energy use in manufacturing accounts for about one-third of global final energy demands, yet it is more challenging than the technology would indicate to actually make the plant more energy-efficient. Technical, financial, organizational, and behavioral barriers all contribute to this challenge, and they rarely occur in isolation.

Objectives: This review article consolidates the knowledge around technical energy-efficiency interventions, organizational governance, and digital tools from Industry 4.0 and develops a strategic taxonomy for energy management in industry. The methods used were in line with the PRISMA approach and included non-structured snowball sampling and the collection of data from 74 peer-reviewed papers published between 2008 and 2026. They were sorted into themes according to financial, regulatory, organizational, and behavioral aspects, within the framework of PICOC.

Findings: The “energy efficiency gap” is not as much about economics as it is about cognitive bias, internal capital rationing, and a disconnect between the way firms are run and the transition needs of low-carbon. In contrast to intuition, more organizational inertia is found in more competitive firms, although of course, access to external capital and more green management practices reduce the inertia. But Industry 4.0 tools, such as tools for energy monitoring and big data analytics, are helping to create the infrastructure for change; they are not the change themselves.

Conclusion: Behavioral interventions to address status quo bias and hyperbolic discounting, coupled with ISO 50001-aligned governance and a genuine digital transformation plan, will help close the gap. Future research should investigate the changes in pro-environmental intent and actual capital decisions over time as a result of nudges combined with structural redesign. This article presents an overview of the results of the systematic review and synthesizes them to gain a holistic understanding of the field of energy efficiency in manufacturing. This article reviews and summarizes the findings of the systematic review to provide an overview of the field of energy efficiency in manufacturing.