Use of Extended Exergy Analysis to Quantify Advantages and Drawbacks of Decentralizing Industrial Production Lines

In the ongoing debate about the feasibility of enforcing a transition to decentralized energy conversion systems, arguments are often presented that lack scientific rigor. Granted, the issue is multi-faceted and fundamentally multi-disciplinary, and possible solutions strongly depend on the selection of location as well as on local climate and demographics. Furthermore, decentralizing the final energy distribution leads to potential socio-economic considerations that involve value judgements. However, the most serious problem is that media have appropriated the topic and are often publishing opinion papers authored by non-specialists and even by representatives of interest groups. The present paper proposes an approach that is innovative on two counts: first, it treats “final energy” as any other commodity and therefore expands the field of investigation to the problems arising from the decentralization of a generic production line or technological chain; second, it argues that a method solidly rooted in Thermodynamics, the Extended Exergy Accounting, may be used to quantify the total amount of primary exergy resources requested by a decentralized strategy (as opposed to a centralized one), so that a comparison can be performed and discussed on a rational, unbiased and scientific basis. This is an introductory paper that reports some theoretical results of the method: realistic applications are perforce excluded because the idea is that the procedure must be drafted in such a way to be applicable to different socio-economic scenarios and locations and to remain valid under a broad range of boundary conditions.