A proposal for energy services' classification including a product service systems perspective

Western manufacturing companies have lately started to rethink their approach to sustainability, mainly because of three different issues arising in the international context: 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. 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, a more focused attention to energy efficiency has arisen, 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 classification is proposed to map different types of energy services, based on existing categorizations 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 new general classification for energy services, discussed separately and fragmentary so far in literature.