Assessing the sustainability of the UK society using thermodynamic concepts: Part 2

By building on the first part of our analysis, this second part attempts to provide a further understanding of the UK society's metabolism, its impact and offer policy suggestions that could promote a shift towards sustainability. The methodologies employed in this second part include Exergy Analysis (EA) and Extended Exergy Analysis (EEA). Exergy inputs and outputs amounted to 17423.9 and 11888.7 PJ, respectively, with energy carries, mainly fossil fuels, being both the predominant inputs (15597.1 PJ) and outputs (5147.1 PJ). Exergy consumption and efficiency for various economic sectors and subsectors have been calculated with the residential and service sector showing the lowest exergy conversion efficiencies (11.2% and 12.3%, respectively) while certain industrial subsectors, such as the aluminium and iron/steel industries showed the highest exergy conversion factors (67.0 and 62.1%). Extended exergy efficiencies were somewhat different owing to the different calculation procedure. Extended exergy efficiencies were 91.4% for the extraction sector, 38.9% for the conversion sector, 49.1% for the agriculture sector, 31.5% for the transportation sector, 38.6% for the industrial sector and 80.0% for the tertiary sector.