Novel approach for fair allocation of primary energy consumption among cogenerated energy-intensive products based on the actual local area production scenario

Multi-generation facilities are almost always part of a local production scenario, i.e., a local area (district, city, regional, national, interstate) energy system providing end users with electricity, residential heating or air-conditioning, industrial process steam, desalinated water, and/or other energy-intensive products. Because of the growth of energy consumption and environmental concerns, local, national, and international regulations and standards tend to incorporate and enforce methods for energy and environmental rating of the end uses of primary energy. Important to such methods, is the definition of fair criteria to allocate fuel consumption among cogenerated products. Allocation based on prescribed primary energy factors for each product corresponding to the average efficiencies of separate production facilities may result in unfair figures and inconsistencies which become increasingly important as cogeneration gains higher fractions of the local energy market. To overcome this problem, we propose a slightly more elaborate, but self-consistent method whereby the allocation is adaptive and self-tuned to the local energy scenario. For heat and power cogeneration, we propose to allocate fuel consumption on the basis of the average primary energy factors for electricity and heat in the given local area including the cogeneration facility of interest. We call it the Self-Tuned Average-Local-Productions Reference (STALPR) method. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.