On a worldwide scale, industry is responsible for a large part for the overall use of energy and resources: reducing this use is included in the targets of SDG9, one of the Sustainable Development Goals drawn by the United Nations. This work aims to create a framework for better understanding, modelling, and optimizing the energy consumption of industrial robots, with specific reference to the collaborative robot UR5e. The framework comprises a real robot and its electro-dynamic model, the latter being developed on the basis of experimental tests and of data supplied by the manufacturer. The paper presents the main features of the framework, and the future work aimed at improving the accuracy of the proposed energy model.