A framework for energy services within Product Service Systems classification

In recent years, the economic and financial crisis that has been slowing down the international markets‟ growth, the necessity to increase competitiveness and the growing awareness of environmental and energy problems, has forced Western manufacturing industries to rethink their approach to sustainability. This process has eventually led to the spread of Servitization strategies causing the transformation of several equipment/components manufacturers into service providers, as well as to the creation of the concept of Product-Service Systems (PSS).Furthermore, it has also ended up in a more focused attention to energy efficiency, with the dual objective of both containing costs and meeting international regulations. The intersection of these two development paths is the constant increase in the supply of energy services, which can be marketed together with devices, machines or energy vectors, creating a peculiar form of PSS. In the present work, a new framework is proposed to classify and map different types of energy services, based on existing classifications of PSS and enriching them with new parameters which are typical of energy services literature, such as the level of risks sharing. The main objective of this work is to highlight the tight connection between the provision of energy services and the concepts of PSS and sustainability, in order to provide a general classification for energy services, discussed separately and fragmentary so far in literature.