Summary:
For any proposal on energy transition, it is necessary to know the energy reality (sources, transformations, uses, impacts) and to have suitable tools for its measurement and accounting. Today, the most widely used tool (regional, national and global) are the energy balances of the International Energy Agency (IEA), developed during the 1970s and which, in accordance with the reality of the time, reflect the reality of fossil fuels. It is a top-down approach that starts from the primary energies that, once transformed, give rise to the final energy (or energy carriers) that companies in the energy sector sell to users. Absent is the analysis of the energy transformations in the user processes up to the useful energy, which really provides the effects and activates the processes (heat, light, movement, conformation of matter, information, communication, etc.). As the weight of renewable energies has been increasing in the energy mix, this methodology has been unable to incorporate them satisfactorily due to its nature of dispersed and distributed flows, temporarily variable, but permanent and inexhaustible. The purpose of this communication is to highlight the shortcomings of the current model and to propose a new energy accounting that incorporates useful energy and reverses the path to travel: starting from the needs of useful energy (at user level) and going through the reverse upstream path in the search for the most efficient energy sources and itineraries. By focusing attention on the uses of useful energy, this accounting recovers part of the lost complexity and has the virtue of generating very important pedagogical effects on users, planners and society as a whole. At the same time, it highlights the higher efficiency of the renewable system compared to the fossil and nuclear system.
Keywords: energy, energy accounting, primary energy, final energy, useful energy, energy sources, energy uses
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