Assessment and Improvement of Energy Efficiency in the Context of Competitiveness

According to the results of 2020, the total energy consumption for the production of 1 ton of cathode copper at UMMC was 2.37 tons. This is more than 2–2.5 times more than for the main competing companies. This situation once again confirms the strong lag of domestic companies behind foreign ones in energy efficiency issues. Increasing the energy efficiency of production processes without reducing the output of copper products reflected positive dynamics in terms of advancing electricity consumption and primary fuel and energy resources in relation to the growth of production volumes included in the block of economic efficiency of energy consumption and the efficiency of using fixed assets, for almost most of the competing companies. Such trends in changes in the considered indicators as a whole for the period 2012–2020 years, first of all, indicate that the overwhelming majority of leading companies today are striving for rational energy conservation and improving energy efficiency. For example, at the end of 2020, the energy intensity of the company’s fixed production assets was 508 g/t/USD, and the electric capacity was 1215 kWh/thousand USD. On the other hand, many experts note that the cost of fixed assets of Russian companies is somewhat underestimated in comparison with foreign competitors. However, this fact still does not change the situation with low energy efficiency of most of them, which is indicated by the indicators under consideration.