In 2011, the average company spent about 740 thousand euros on the purchase of energy, 61% more than in 2003. This is what emerges from the estimates of the study "Questioni di Economice e Finanza" carried out by the Bank of Italy. The work offers a methodology to reconstruct the energy expenditure of Italian manufacturing firms with at least 20 employees for the period 2003-2011.
The proposed imputation method assumes that the sectoral demand for each energy source is linked only to the added value. Realized through a plurality of sources to impute the physical consumption of energy at the company level in the Invind archive, the study obtains the expenditure by valuing this consumption with the prices on the markets of the various sources. The highest costs seem to concern firms located in the north, the larger ones and those in the building materials and ceramics and petrochemical sectors.
From 2003 to 2011, the incidence of energy costs grew steadily, from 2,3 to 2,6% in relation to turnover and from 27,1 to 30,8 in relation to labor costs. By relating this incidence with company performance indicators (for example the ability to generate value and to accumulate capital), other conditions being equal, it appears that companies with higher expenses have lower growth with respect to invoiced volumes and a lower propensity to export.
The distribution of energy costs is localized by sector and firm size. The companies that have recorded the highest increases in expenditure are smaller, located in the South, operating in the sectors of means of transport, metallurgy or glass ceramics and the companies with a greater presence on foreign markets. The results indicate that, checking for the sectors in which the companies operate, the average energy expenditure grows with the number of employees (companies with over 250 employees have costs about 5 times higher than the average) and is higher for the more productive and for internationalized ones; on the other hand, it is lower for firms located in the Center and in the South and for those with fewer than 50 employees.
In Italy, dependence on foreign countries for energy revenues and the prices paid by businesses and consumers are high by international comparison. Following the increase in electricity prices, caused by the financing of renewable electric energies, the situation in our country seems to have collapsed: in the last three years, the contribution per megawatt hour paid by companies with bills to finance renewables has more than doubled going from 16,5 euros in 2010 to 40,6 euros in 2012. Despite the attention paid to the issue of energy costs, there is no official statistics on energy costs in companies and those available in the literature are quite rare and in any case with a level of disaggregation limited to sectoral information.
Gas and electricity are the main sources of energy used by Italian companies. However, the expenditure incurred for the purchase of gas is lower than that incurred for electricity: in 2011, the latter amounted to around 13,8 billion euros, equal to 68 per cent of the total costs for the energy supply.
At the basis of this work is the strong dynamics of energy prices recorded on a global scale in the last decade which has placed the relationship between energy spending by companies and their competitiveness at the center of the policy debate. The energy question in Europe is often one of the main factors blocking industrial expansion.
