Early Retirement of Industrial Facilities

Early retirement policies aim at reducing unneeded capacity and modernizing the existing fleet of industrial plants. If overcapacity is an issue, the least efficient, most polluting plants should be shut down. Early retirement policies should have a clearly defined metric for plant selection ahead of time, rather than selecting plants on an ad hoc basis. Efficiency standards, such as BTU/unit output or pollution standards, such as CO₂ per unit output can be used to set closure criteria. Closure criteria should be selected for each individual industrial sector (e.g., separately for cement and for steel manufacturing) to account for differences across industries.