Probabilistic model allocating primary energy to end-use devices

Useful Energy consumption is regarded as the main driver of energy system transitions. However, there are few national level estimates of useful energy consumption, mainly due to the lack of data and concerns about uncertainty. The first step to compute the useful energy consumption involves allocating primary energy to end-use conversion devices. A method is developed that employs widely available end-use energy statistics to allocate energy to conversion devices. The method includes an uncertainty analysis which is believe to increase the robustness of the results. In this paper, the method is applied to the United Kingdom in 2013. The results show that boilers are the device converting most primary energy in the UK (2.2 ±0.13 EJ) and that the consumption mix for the UK is much more equally distributed among devices compared to the global level and to China. The uncertainty analysis shows that it is difficult to rank many of the devices in terms of their primary energy consumption because the uncertainty is higher than the difference between the expected values; and that most uncertainty in the allocation is due to the uncertainty in the end use of final energy.