Barriers to practical implementation:

From the data collected, the major barriers identified were lack of familiarity with the exergy concept, complexity of the procedure and pricing of resources without consideration of energy quality. For example, interviewee #1, who was overseeing an energy audit of around 200 manufacturing sites in Belgium and France, said:

“Well, just from a practical point of view, I see people struggling with the energy concepts in a factory and how can they deal with exergy aspects, so, I think from a practical point of view, it is very

challenging.”

This challenge of less familiarity with the exergy concept is linked with the complexity associated with conducting an exergy analysis. Interviewee #1 had the following to say in this regard:

“It’s beneficial, but practically, you are a bit limited because of the complexity. And I am not sure that you can apply it so widely as an energy audit. You need energy auditors who can understand the

concept and who can easily implement the methodology in the different cases they are confronted with, and I am a bit sceptical about that.”

As mentioned before, the pricing of resources presents an issue as well. Even if the approach is applied in practice, this is an issue that goes beyond the scope of thermodynamics. While the exergy approach can be good at quantifying the value in resource flows, pricing may not always follow accordingly. Below are some comments of the interviewees relevant this topic,

“The analysis of exergy, with energy quality and quantity is inhibited to a large extent by the fact that we pay for quantity, not for quality. Energy quantity is used in an audit, in the core reporting to the company, quality is hardly ever covered. The (exergy) concept is just rock solid, but when it comes to

application in the real world, it is not a lot of value (economically). The whole system of valuing energy and not its quality of course needs to be reformulated and that is a political issue that I am

very doubtful it will ever happen.” (Interviewee #3)

“That is one of the main barriers I do see. In general, one can say the higher the quality, the higher the price. But this is not always the case, as at some points, power can be cheaper than natural gas.

In the city of Keul, they started inserting electric boilers within the heating grid to replace natural gas. So they are using electricity to heat up water to 100 degree Celsius, which is not very exergy efficient. But from an economical point of view, there was so much wind power that they really needed to discharge it, so they could use it to heat up water at very low prices.” (Interviewee #1)

This comment shows that value is not always allotted based on the exergy content of flows, however it is also true that using renewable electrical exergy to heat water, however exergy inefficient reduces the proportion of non-renewable exergy usage. This agrees with the conceptual approach presented in thesis which uses non-renewable exergy consumption as an indicator for resource consumption. Table 28 below presents a collection of all the barriers identified by the respondents to help extract the major ones.

Table 28 - Barriers identified to the practical application of the factory analysis approach

Person Barrier identified

Interviewee #1  Industry people struggle to understand energy, exergy aspects is going to be practically more challenging

 Resources are not always priced in consideration of energy quality

 Practically limited due to complexity, e.g. exergy allocation due to products

 Additional incurred costs

Interviewee #2  People sticking to old habits

 Time consuming

 Additional costs

 Low understanding of the exergy concept

Interviewee #3  We pay for energy quantity, not quality and therefore energy audits are designed this way

 Lack of economic value

 Deployment of insights gained

 Lack of understanding in education system (which is not likely to be addressed)

 Barriers to its application might change, depending on the location.

LinkedIn(Environmental Programmes Manager at BMW Group)

 Combining mass and energy flows results in too few key target metrics, making targeted reduction difficult

LinkedIn(Sustainability manager at ABB)

 Single indicator can be misleading

LinkedIn(Country Head of Energy & Sustainability at COFELY)

 Unified indicator reduces flexibility in choices available to clients.

Survey Respondent #2  Single indicator does not provide enough detail

 Low understanding of energy concept by the industry

 Energy is typically a low expenditure for companies, as compared to others.

Using the above table, the following distinct barriers were identified, 1. Lack of understanding of the exergy concept

2. Pricing of resource does not always consider resource quality 3. High complexity of analysis method

4. Time consuming 5. Additional costs

6. Actual deployment of gained insights 7. People sticking to old habits

8. Measuring sustainability with a single indicator does not provide enough detail and flexibility These barriers being recognised, suitable means to overcome them needed to be identified as well. Therefore, the final section of analysis deals with the drivers that could possibly make the approach presented in this thesis useful for the industry on a large scale.