Abstract

In the recent past, several examples of the application of Exergy Analysis (ExA) to Very Large Complex Systems, including entire countries, have been published, and it can be fairly said that—while the goals of the individual authors were completely consistent—the results, the conclusions and the recommendations diverge. There are several contingent reasons for this, but the underlying problem is that a purely thermodynamic analysis cannot reproduce the complex influence that monetary, social, political and technological factors have on the purely “material” or “energetic” streams. Clearly, ExA represents a substantial improvement with respect to the “Material and Energy Balance Reports” published annually by most industrialized countries, because the exergy flow diagram unequivocally demonstrates how and at what penalty the primary exergy inflow (fossil fuels, renewables, ores, harvested food and other primary goods) is transformed into final energy, such as diesel fuel, electricity or other commodities. The issue here is, though, that the so-called Externalities (Capital, Labor and Environmental Effects) are, in spite of some opinion to the contrary, completely left out of the picture. It turns out though that ExA can be extended by including the exergy equivalents of the externalities. The theory is called Extended Exergy Accounting (EEA) as a reminder of the inclusion of monetary, labor and environmental “exergy costs” in the global budget. The scope of the study presented in this paper is twofold: First, the introduction of a novel approach based on the exploitation of a very disaggregated dataset, in order to perform the EEA of a whole country; second, the analysis of the results of the application of the method to the Italian society, over a five-year (2013–2017) window of observation, to extract new insights that could be useful to critically assess the trend of the exergy destruction of Italy vs. that of the GDP.

Highlights

  • The present tendency in the world seems to imply that an ever-increasing number of countries are willing to access a “Western life standard”, whereas the limited supply of primary energy is driving politicians, economists and public awareness toward an unavoidable acknowledgment of the necessity of a “sustainable” growth

  • The scope of the study presented in this paper is twofold: First, the introduction of a novel approach based on the exploitation of a very disaggregated dataset, in order to perform the Exergy Accounting (EEA) of a whole country; second, the analysis of the results of the application of the method to the Italian society, over a five-year (2013–2017) window of observation, to extract new insights that could be useful to critically assess the trend of the exergy destruction of Italy vs

  • The aim of this work is twofold: First, the introduction of a novel approach based on the exploitation of a very disaggregated dataset, in order to perform the EEA of a whole country; second, the analysis of Italian society, over a five-year (2013–2017) window of observation, to extract new insights that could be useful to critically assess the trend of the exergy destruction of Italy vs. that of the GDP

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Summary

Introduction

The present tendency in the world seems to imply that an ever-increasing number of countries are willing to access a “Western life standard”, whereas the limited supply of primary energy is driving politicians, economists and public awareness toward an unavoidable acknowledgment of the necessity of a “sustainable” growth. 1987, the “Brundtland Commission” of the United Nations formally coined the term sustainable development in the report named “Our Common Future” as “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [1]. Such a definition, attractive, is barely suitable to rigorous methodological applications, because of the fuzziness of the concept of “needs of the present”

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