Compressed Air Systems (CAS) are one of the most common and energy intensive utilities in industry, representing up to 10% of the industrial energy needs. Thus, they can be considered as one of the main target systems while planning energy efficiency actions implementation in industry. Nevertheless, most of the available benchmarks of energy consumption are based on nominal data, thus referring to the quality of the design, while benchmarks based on measurements under actual operating conditions are not yet available.

In accordance with the Italian transposition of the European Directive 2012/27/EU (i.e. Legislative Decree 102/2014), large and energy-intensive business organizations must perform energy audits at least every four years starting in 2015 and the Italian Energy, New Technology and Environment Agency (ENEA) has the task of collecting and analysing them. In this context, a data collection focused on CAS has been carried out and the subsequent data analysis, focused on nine most promising industrial sectors, has allowed to assess the current state of the art of CAS’s energy efficiency in Italy and to design a possible benchmarking system. Such a system is composed of a set of indicators and a benchmarking visual tool in the form of a matrix. In particular, results related to the Manufacturing of basic metals will be presented for sake of brevity. In this paper we present the results obtained from both the data analysis and the first application of the proposed benchmarking system, together with next steps for the creation of reliable sectorial and cross-sectorial benchmarks.

压缩空气系统（CAS）是工业上最常见的能源密集型公用事业之一，占工业能源需求的10％。因此，在规划工业中的节能行动实施时，它们可以被视为主要目标系统之一。但是，大多数可用的能耗基准都是基于名义数据，因此是指设计的质量，而基于实际工作条件下的测量的基准尚不可用。

根据意大利对欧洲指令2012/27 / EU的转换（即第102/2014号法令），大型耗能企业必须从2015年开始至少每四年进行一次能源审核，以及意大利能源，新技术环境署（ENEA）的任务是收集和分析它们。在这种情况下，已经进行了针对CAS的数据收集，随后针对九个最有前途的工业部门的数据分析使我们能够评估CAS在意大利的能效现状，并设计可能的基准测试系统。这样的系统由一组指标和矩阵形式的基准可视化工具组成。为了简洁起见，将特别介绍与基础金属制造相关的结果。