Haute Lumière
Commerce · III.02 · MMXXVI · daylight
Energy as the Denominator
Volume III — Money, Energy, Information
THE PLATE
THE LETTER
Every proposal to remake money eventually arrives at the same suspicion: that a dollar is an opinion and a joule is a fact. The suspicion is old, it is serious, and it is held by better people than its critics usually admit. Frederick Soddy, who had already won a Nobel Prize for the chemistry of isotopes, spent the last third of his life arguing that an economy which lets its debts compound faster than its energy flows can grow is an economy that has mistaken arithmetic for physics. Howard Scott and a young M. King Hubbert tried to build a working currency on it. Buckminster Fuller proposed the kilowatt-hour as a planetary unit of account. Howard Odum spent forty years constructing an entire accounting system in which every good, every service and every wetland carried a figure in solar emjoules.
None of them were cranks, and none of their currencies exist.
This chapter takes that proposition seriously enough to test it to destruction, which is a different activity from dismissing it. The claim under test is precise: energy is the one non-arbitrary numeraire — the only unit of account whose definition does not depend on somebody's preference. We are going to find that the claim is half right, that the half which is right is more useful than the whole would have been, and that almost every failed attempt failed for a reason that had nothing to do with energy.
You will want two things from this chapter by the end of it. The first is the ability to say exactly where an energy denominator is load-bearing and where it is decoration, because you will be handed both and they look identical on a slide. The second is an instrument — a way of putting an energy unit into a real contract, beside the money and not instead of it, in a form your treasurer will sign.
Chapter I.01 computed how much energy arrives and what it costs to fetch it. Chapter II.06 establishes what thermodynamics does and does not license an economist to say. This chapter asks the question neither of those asks: a denominator of what, exactly, and by whom agreed?
— The Editors
DISCOVERY
What is already working
Start where the argument is strongest, which is not where its advocates usually start. The energy denominator is not a proposal. It is already in production, in several large and boring places, and it works.
The accounts of every oil and gas company on earth. Reserves are reported in barrels of oil equivalent. Six thousand cubic feet of natural gas is converted to one barrel on an energy basis, and that conversion goes into audited statements, into reserve-based lending covenants, and into the valuation of companies worth hundreds of billions. This is an energy numeraire operating inside generally accepted accounting principles, and it has been doing so for half a century.
France's certificats d'économies d'énergie. Since 2006 French energy suppliers have carried a legal obligation denominated not in euros and not in tonnes of carbon but in kilowatt-hours cumac — kilowatt-hours saved, cumulated over the life of the measure and discounted. Obligated parties acquire them, trade them on a register, and settle a statutory duty with them. The unit of account is a kilowatt-hour. Hundreds of millions of euros change hands each year in a market whose denominator is energy.
Italy's titoli di efficienza energetica do the same work in tonnes of oil equivalent, and have since 2005. Energy performance contracts — the shared-savings facility built in Chapter I.01 — settle in avoided kilowatt-hours verified under IPMVP, which means the payment obligation is a function of an energy measurement and not of a price.
So the first finding is a correction of the terms of the debate. The question is not could energy serve as a unit of account. It does, daily, at scale, in statutory instruments and audited accounts. The question is how far that unit can be pushed before it stops telling the truth, and that is an empirical question with a measurable answer.
Second, the intellectual core is strong and it is not what most people think it is. Robert Costanza published a paper in Science in 1980 that is still the most interesting result in the field: he computed the embodied energy of the outputs of the United States input–output table and compared it with their market values. The correlation was close — but only when the accounting included the solar energy embodied in environmental inputs and the energy embodied in household labour. Restricted to fuels alone, the relationship weakened considerably. David Huettner's reply the same year pressed exactly there, and the exchange is worth reading in full because both men were right about different things. Costanza had found that prices track embodied energy when the energy boundary is drawn wide enough — and Huettner had found that the boundary was doing a great deal of the work.
Third, energy explains growth better than capital and labour do. Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr rebuilt the twentieth-century production function using useful work — exergy actually delivered as motion, heat and light after conversion losses — rather than energy inputs or capital stock. The Solow residual, the famous unexplained remainder that conventional growth accounting attributes to "technical progress", largely disappears. Growth in useful work accounts for most of it. Reiner Kümmel's independent work with cost-share weighting reaches a compatible conclusion by another route. This is the single strongest piece of evidence that energy belongs in the denominator of something important.
Fourth, and least known: emergy gets the right answer where prices are silent. Howard Odum's system assigns every flow a value in solar emjoules — the solar energy that had to be converted, directly and indirectly, to make it. Its practical achievement was never the valuation of a car. It was the valuation of an estuary, a mangrove, a river's geopotential — things with no price, for which the alternative was not a worse number but no number at all, and therefore a zero in the analysis. Odum's Florida studies put figures on wetlands in the 1980s that the contingent-valuation literature took another fifteen years to approach from the other side.
Four working cases, and a pattern that runs through all of them: energy works as a denominator precisely where money is missing or mute. In a statutory obligation where no price exists until the state creates one. In an ecosystem nobody trades. In a growth accounting where the money measure has a hole in it labelled "technical progress". The denominator earns its place by filling silences — and that is a much stronger claim than the one its advocates usually make, which is that it should replace the money measure everywhere.
THE ARITHMETIC
What works, what does not, and where the line sits
First, what the historical failures actually failed at.
Technocracy Incorporated proposed energy certificates in the early 1930s, on the back of the Energy Survey of North America, with Hubbert — later the author of peak-oil analysis — doing much of the technical work. The design: total net energy converted on the continent over a two-year balancing period, divided among the adult population, issued as certificates.
The certificates had two properties, and they are the whole story. They were non-transferable — you could not pay another citizen with yours. And they expired at the end of the balancing period.
Score that against what a unit of account has to do:
unit of account — one number two parties agree on kept
medium of exchange — transferable to a third party DROPPED
store of value — carried across a period DROPPED
1 of 3 = 33.3%The energy standard was never tested. What was tested was the abolition of exchange and of saving, and when that failed the verdict was written up as a verdict on energy. Every subsequent proposal that repeats the design error inherits the result: a unit that cannot be given away and cannot be held is not a currency, whatever its denominator.
The cost of the second omission is computable. At the United States personal saving rate of 4.6 percent, applied to Technocracy's own claimed per-adult income, the design refuses to represent $920 a year — $1,840 across one balancing period. That is not a rounding error in a monetary system. That is the entire mechanism by which households handle a bad year.
And the claimed income deserves its own line, because it shows the second failure mode. Technocracy's literature put the energy income at roughly $20,000 per adult per year in mid-1930s dollars. Priced forward on the consumer price index — 13.7 in 1935, about 320.0 now, a factor of 23.36 — that is $467,000 a year, per adult, in today's money, against an actual United States output per head on the order of $67,000. A factor of 7.0.
The error is instructive and it is not arithmetic. The energy arithmetic was sound. What was assumed without being shown was the conversion efficiency from joules into things people want — and that assumption is the entire subject of this chapter.
Second, emergy, with its real numbers and its real criticisms.
Odum's unit is the transformity: solar emjoules required per joule delivered. Published values, on Odum's 1996 basis:
source transformity on the 2016 baseline
----------------------------------------------------------------------
sunlight, by definition 1 sej/J 1 sej/J
wind, kinetic 1,496 sej/J 1,902 sej/J
rain, chemical potential 18,199 sej/J 23,134 sej/J
wood and biomass 26,000 sej/J 33,051 sej/J
coal 39,800 sej/J 50,593 sej/J
crude oil 53,000 sej/J 67,373 sej/J
electricity 159,000 sej/J 202,119 sej/JRead the second column before the first, because it carries the criticism. Every transformity is quoted against a planetary emergy baseline — the total solar emergy driving the biosphere each year. Odum put it at 9.44 × 10²⁴ solar emjoules per year in 1996. A revision with Brown and Brandt-Williams in 2000 put it at 15.83 × 10²⁴. Brown and Ulgiati's 2016 revision settled at 12.00 × 10²⁴.
Those are multipliers of 1.271 and 1.677 on every published figure in the literature, and the two revisions differ from each other by 1.319. A transformity is not a physical constant. It is a physical measurement divided by a convention, and the convention has moved by a third within the field's own lifetime.
The defence is exact and it is good: the ratios survive. Electricity to coal is 3.99 on any baseline. Rain to wind is 12.17 on any baseline. Rebaselining multiplies numerator and denominator alike. So emergy is reliable as a comparative instrument and unreliable as an absolute one — which is the honest reading, and it is the reading Brown and Ulgiati themselves give.
The harder criticisms are on method, and they are not answered by ratios. Sergio Ulgiati's and Mark Brown's own algebra has been challenged by Enrico Sciubba on second-law grounds: emergy's allocation rules, he argues, do not behave the way a thermodynamic potential must. Jeroen Hau and Bhavik Bakshi, sympathetic reviewers, catalogued the problems of double counting in loops and the absence of a unique algorithm for co-products. Mansson and McGlade had raised the exergy-definition problem earlier. Cutler Cleveland and colleagues made the general case against aggregating heterogeneous energies at all.
And here is the cut.
Emergy was built to value things that have no price. To do that it must value human labour and human services — the engineer, the lawyer, the contractor — and it has no physical route to those. So it uses a ratio: the emergy-to-money ratio, national emergy use divided by national GDP, of the order of 10¹² solar emjoules per dollar. Every service in every emergy analysis is valued by multiplying its price by that ratio.
Follow it through. Hold national emergy use flat and let real GDP grow at 3 percent. The emergy-to-money ratio falls by 2.91 percent a year — 25.6 percent over a decade. An hour of engineering valued at 3.00 × 10¹³ sej today is worth 2.23 × 10¹³ sej in ten years, with nothing physical having changed about the engineer, the hour, or the work.
The accounting system built to escape prices closes its books with a price. That is not fatal — it is honest practice, disclosed in the literature — but it means the non-arbitrary numeraire is arbitrary in exactly the place where it touches people, and any claim that emergy is independent of the money economy is a claim its own method contradicts.
Third, the energy intensity of GDP — what the country comparison shows.
Primary energy per unit of output, at purchasing-power parity, approximately 2021, from the SDG 7.3.1 series maintained by the IEA and the World Bank:
Ireland 1.6 MJ / $2017 PPP China 6.4
United Kingdom 2.6 Canada 6.9
Germany 3.0 South Africa 7.3
Japan 3.4 Russia 8.2
India 4.2 Iceland 15.6
United States 4.6 WORLD 4.6The widest spread is 9.75 times. Both extremes are accounting artefacts as much as physics: Iceland smelts aluminium with stranded geothermal and hydro that has nowhere else to go, and Ireland's GDP carries the booked profits of firms whose energy is burned on other continents. Strip both and the defensible spread is 3.15 times, Russia against the United Kingdom — still large, still real, still mostly structure rather than virtue.
The rate matters more than the level. Global energy intensity has been improving at about 1.8 percent a year against an SDG target rate of 2.6 percent — a shortfall of 0.8 points, a factor of 1.44. At the observed rate, halving takes 38.2 years; at the target rate, 26.3. And to hold total energy use flat while output grows 3 percent a year, intensity must fall 2.91 percent a year — 1.62 times the rate actually being achieved.
Fourth, decoupling, with both halves on the page.
The territorial evidence is real and it should be stated without hedging. United Kingdom territorial greenhouse gas emissions fell from 810 MtCO₂e in 1990 to 384 MtCO₂e in 2023 — a cut of 52.6 percent — while real output grew about 82 percent. Emissions per unit of output fell 73.95 percent. That is absolute decoupling, sustained for three decades, in a large industrial economy. Corinne Le Quéré and colleagues found eighteen countries with sustained declines between 2005 and 2015, at a mean rate of 2.4 percent a year.
Consumption-based accounting weakens it, and the size of the weakening is computable. Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira found 6.2 GtCO₂ embodied in international trade in 2004 — 22.96 percent of global fossil carbon dioxide. Glen Peters and colleagues traced net transfers from developing to developed economies rising from 0.4 GtCO₂ in 1990 to 1.6 GtCO₂ in 2008, a factor of 4.00.
Take the United Kingdom's own footprint and assume, as a bound rather than a measurement, that 46 percent of it is embedded in imports and that the imported half did not fall at all. The consumption footprint then falls by 28.40 percent rather than 52.6 — 54.00 percent of the headline survives. Defra's measured series has the same shape: a real decline, and a much smaller one. Multi-region input–output databases agree with each other to roughly 10 percent for most countries, so the gap is several times larger than the uncertainty of the instrument that finds it.
Then the rate question, which decides the argument. At 2.4 percent a year, a halving takes 28.5 years and a 90 percent cut takes 94.8. A 90 percent cut in 25 years requires 8.80 percent a year — 3.67 times the best observed rate. Helmut Haberl and colleagues reviewed 835 studies and found relative decoupling common, absolute decoupling rare, and decoupling at the required rate essentially unevidenced. Thomas Wiedmann and colleagues found material footprint rising with an elasticity near 0.60 to GDP once trade is accounted for: double output and material use rises 51.6 percent. Relative decoupling, and an absolute rise.
Fifth — the honest negative, and it is the one that decides the chapter.
Energy is not a sufficient denominator, because a joule's usefulness is time- and place-dependent, and the spread is not a correction term. It is larger than the thing being measured.
Quality. One megajoule of electricity can do a megajoule of work. One megajoule of water at 40 °C, against a 20 °C ambient, has a Carnot factor of 6.39 percent — it can do 0.0639 megajoules of work. A factor of 15.7 between two identical quantities of energy. At 80 °C the factor is 5.89.
Place. In August 2022, gas at the Dutch TTF hub peaked near €339.20 per megawatt-hour. The same month, Henry Hub gas sold at about $8.80 per MMBtu — $30.03 per megawatt-hour, €29.39. A factor of 11.54 on the same molecule in the same month.
Time. In the ERCOT market in Texas, the annual average real-time price was around $22 per megawatt-hour in 2020. In February 2021 the price sat at the system-wide offer cap of $9,000 for roughly 96 hours. A factor of 409.1, on the same electron, in the same market, inside twelve months. The floor is negative $251, so the span is $9,251 per megawatt-hour.
Multiply the two independent spreads — quality and time — and you get an illustrative upper bound of about 6,405 times, 3.81 orders of magnitude. That is not a measured quantity and it should not be quoted as one. It is the honest scale of the gap between a flat joule and the joule a buyer actually wanted.
A unit whose value moves across three orders of magnitude inside one year in one market is a denominator, not a numeraire. It can measure. It cannot settle.
And the same fault is visible in the accounts we started from. A barrel of oil equivalent converts gas to oil at 6 mcf to 1 on an energy basis. At $80 oil and $3 gas, an energy-equal barrel of gas is worth $17.40 — the conversion is wrong by 4.60 times. At Europe's August 2022 price the identical conversion is wrong by 6.07 times in the opposite direction. The energy denominator already in GAAP is already known to be wrong by a factor of several, in a direction that moves with the market, and the accounts carry it anyway — because it is still the best stable thing to count.
That is the correct posture toward the whole proposition.
DREAM
What becomes ordinary
In the economy where this has been absorbed, nothing is denominated in joules and everything is measured in them.
Every material contract of any size carries two columns. One is money, and it does what money does: it settles, it clears, it discharges the obligation. The other is energy, exergy-weighted and indexed to the hour and the node, and it does what money cannot: it stays comparable across thirty years, three currencies and two regimes of inflation. Nobody confuses the columns. The second column is not a payment. It is a measurement that the payment can be checked against, and it is checked.
Procurement knows the exergy content of what it buys, not just the energy content, because the distinction between a megajoule of electricity and a megajoule of warm water is the difference between a process that can be electrified and one that cannot, and that is a capital decision worth knowing five years early.
The treasury hedges in both. A firm with a large thermal load holds its exposure as a quantity of delivered exergy at a node, and the financial hedge is constructed against that quantity rather than against a barrel of something correlated with it. When the correlation breaks — and it broke, in 2022, for everyone who was hedging gas with oil — the firms that had measured in exergy knew immediately what they were short of.
National accounts publish an energy and materials satellite beside GDP, on the same release date and with the same standing. Consumption-based emissions and material footprints are published alongside territorial ones, not as an activist supplement but as a statistical series, because a country that reports only the emissions inside its borders is reporting its supply chain's location rather than its own consumption.
And the arguments that used to be interminable have become short. Someone says a process is efficient; someone else asks in what, and the answer is a number with a boundary attached. The interesting disagreements have moved to where they belong — to the boundary, which is where they always were.
DESIGN
The structure that gets there
Four components, in this order, because each depends on the one before it.
One — the second column, and never the only column.
The design rule is that energy is a denominator and money is the numeraire. Anything reported in energy is reported beside the money figure, on the same line, in the same document. This is not a compromise; it is what the arithmetic above licenses. A unit that varies by 409 times across a year can measure a physical fact reliably and cannot discharge an obligation reliably. Use each for what it does.
Two — weight by exergy, not by energy, and publish the weights.
The flat joule is the fault. The correction is a published conversion table: electricity and shaft work at 1.00; heat at its Carnot factor against a stated ambient; fuels at their exergy content. The table must be published, versioned, and dated, for exactly the reason emergy's baseline demonstrates: an accounting convention that moves silently invalidates every historical series computed with it. Odum's field learned that at a cost of 1.271 on every number it had ever published. Publish the version and the ambient temperature with every figure, the way an accountant publishes the exchange rate.
Three — index the unit to time and place, or admit it does not travel.
A kilowatt-hour at the Dutch hub in August 2022 and a kilowatt-hour at Henry Hub in the same month differ by 11.54 times, and no accounting convention repairs that. So the unit carries its node and its hour, as electricity markets already do with locational marginal pricing. Where the counterparty will not accept a node-and-hour unit, the contract states the basis it is using and the error that basis introduces — a number, not a caveat.
Four — the governance, which is the part that decides whether any of it holds.
The conversion table needs an owner who is not a party to the trades. Inside a firm, that is the same function that owns the transfer-pricing policy. Across firms, it is the role the IPMVP already plays for measurement and verification: a published protocol, maintained by a body with no position in the outcome, which parties reference rather than re-invent. The single greatest predictor of whether an energy-denominated instrument survives contact with a dispute is whether the conversion basis was agreed before the transaction or after it — which is exactly the baseline discipline of Chapter I.01, applied to a different quantity.
The sequence, then. Publish the table. Add the second column to one contract. Let it run one period without anyone acting on it, so the numbers acquire a history before they acquire consequences. Then, and only then, make something depend on it.
DESTINY
How it holds when nobody is pushing
It holds for one structural reason: the second column is cheap and it compounds. An energy series costs almost nothing to maintain once the meters and the conversion table exist, and every year it runs it becomes more valuable, because its value is entirely in comparison across time. A money series is deflated with an index somebody chose. An exergy series is not.
Three failure modes, named so they can be seen coming.
The unit gets promoted. Someone notices the energy column is stable and proposes settling in it. This is the Technocracy error in modern dress, and the tell is always the same: the proposal quietly drops transferability or quietly drops the store of value, because a joule that must be delivered at a node in an hour cannot be held. When that proposal arrives, the answer is the arithmetic: 409 times, in one market, in one year.
The baseline moves silently. The conversion table is updated, the historical series is not restated, and three years of comparison quietly become meaningless. Emergy's own literature is the case study, and the fix is procedural: version the table, restate the history, publish both.
The boundary creeps. Embodied-energy accounting is exquisitely sensitive to where the boundary is drawn — that is the substance of the Costanza–Huettner exchange, and it has not been settled since. A firm that widens its boundary each year will show improvement each year without changing anything physical. The discipline is the same as in any audited series: the boundary is a disclosure, it is stated on every report, and a change to it is a restatement.
And the honest limit. This does not work below a certain measurement density. If the organisation cannot meter at the node and the hour, an energy denominator degrades to an annual aggregate, and an annual aggregate cannot see the 409. It will report a stable number for a year in which the underlying exposure moved by three orders of magnitude, and it will be believed. Below that threshold, the right answer is not a worse energy account. It is to fix the metering first and say plainly that the account is not yet available.
DELIGHT
What it feels like
There is a specific pleasure in holding a number that does not need a vintage. Everything else on the page has a year attached to it — 2017 dollars, 2010 prices, the deflator somebody chose — and the energy column simply says how much, in a unit that meant the same thing when the building was designed and will mean the same thing when it is sold.
And a second pleasure, quieter and better. Somewhere in the second year of keeping the column, you find that you have stopped arguing about whether a process improved. The argument has moved to what the boundary should be, and that is a good argument, the kind people get better at. You will notice the meetings are shorter. Not because agreement arrived — because the disagreement finally has a shape.
The work of it is genuinely absorbing: reading a bill, finding the hour where the price was four hundred times the average, and realising that the plant was running then and nobody knew. That is not a problem discovered. It is a schedule waiting to be written, and moving it is the cheapest money in the building.
OPERATIONALIZE THIS
At the level of finance
The instrument: an energy-denominated repayment tranche — the kWh tranche.
A facility whose principal is advanced in currency and whose repayment obligation is expressed in verified kilowatt-hours saved or delivered, converted to cash at a contracted index. It is not a new species. It is a shared-savings energy performance contract with the denominator moved from the price to the quantity, which changes who carries the price risk and makes the whole thing hedgeable.
The worked case. A manufacturer with a site load of 120.0 GWh a year. A £4.0 million retrofit verified to save 14.0 GWh a year — 11.67 percent of load.
annual value of saving 14,000 MWh x £95.00/MWh = £1,330,000
assigned to repayment x 75% = £997,500
simple payback £4,000,000 / £997,500 = 4.01 years
simple annual return £1,330,000 / £4,000,000 = 33.25%
against a WACC of 9.0%The structure. Principal £4,000,000. Term five years, set just past the computed payback. Repayment is 75 percent of verified saved kilowatt-hours, valued at a contracted index of £95.00 per megawatt-hour, with the balance reverting to the operating unit — the reversion is what buys genuine cooperation and it costs the balance sheet nothing.
The number that decides it. One figure, on the front page, and it is an energy price rather than a return:
facility £4,000,000
------------------- = ------------------------ = £76.19 / MWh
term x MWh x share 5 x 14,000 x 0.75£76.19 per megawatt-hour is the breakeven. Above it the facility repays; below it, it does not. Against the £95.00 index there is £18.81 of headroom, 24.7 percent. At a forward price of £70.00 the facility recovers 91.9 percent of capital over the term and fails. That single number turns an efficiency proposal into a position with a strike, which is a thing a treasurer already knows how to think about — and can hedge.
The exergy check, which is the part that is usually skipped. Of the 14.0 GWh saved, assume 60 percent is electricity and 40 percent is 80 °C heat. Weighted at 1.00 and 0.1699 respectively, the exergy-equivalent saving is 9.35 GWh. The flat-joule figure overstates the tradeable saving by 49.71 percent. If the counterparty is paying against delivered energy, that difference is theirs; if against exergy, it is yours. Decide in the term sheet, not in the dispute.
Balance sheet treatment. The facility is a liability measured at amortised cost; the retrofit capitalises to the asset it improves and depreciates over the improved asset's life. The energy-indexed repayment is an embedded derivative — raise it with the auditors at the term-sheet stage, not at year end. Where the index is the entity's own procurement price, the hedge relationship is often straightforward; where it is a market index the entity does not buy at, it is not. That distinction is worth an hour with the technical accounting partner before the paper is drafted.
Debt service and the covenant. At a 6.0 percent coupon over five years the service is £949,586 a year. At a 75 percent share the DSCR is 1.050 — too thin to finance externally. At 80 percent, repayment is £1,064,000 and the DSCR is 1.120. The covenant to negotiate is not the ratio. It is the floor price, because the ratio is a function of it.
The counterparty. Internal treasury first, as in I.01: a business unit borrowing from the centre, documented in a week, with the conversion table attached as a schedule. Two completed internal facilities give a track record; the external market for this is the ESCO sector and the sustainability-linked loan desks, and both of them will ask for the M&V protocol by name.
The first ninety days.
| Day | Action | Artifact |
|---|---|---|
| 1–15 | Publish the conversion table: exergy weights, ambient, version, date | The table, v1.0 |
| 16–30 | Meter at node and hour for one site; find the 409 | Hourly load profile |
| 31–45 | Agree and sign the energy baseline with finance | The signed baseline |
| 46–60 | Compute the breakeven price; test it against the forward curve | One-page term sheet |
| 61–75 | Draft the tranche; settle the embedded-derivative question | Facility memo |
| 76–90 | Deploy; first verified period in both columns | Money and exergy, side by side |
APPRECIATIVE QUESTIONS
Twelve, for a room
Discovery — what is already working
- Where in this organisation are we already settling an obligation in a physical unit rather than a price — a tonne, a therm, a kilowatt-hour — and what made that the natural choice?
- Who here can already read an hourly load profile, and what have they seen in one that nobody asked them about?
- Think of a decision we got right because somebody counted the physical thing rather than the money. What was it, and what made them look?
Dream — what becomes possible
- If every material contract carried an energy column beside the money column, what is the first question we would be able to answer that we cannot answer today?
- Imagine our accounts in ten years with one series in them that has not been deflated, restated or rebased. What is that series, and who would use it first?
- If we knew the exergy content of everything we buy, which capital decision would we make five years earlier than we otherwise would?
Design — what we build
- What should our conversion table say, who should own it, and what would make them the right owner?
- Where is our measurement dense enough to support an hourly energy account today — and what would it cost to reach that density in one more place?
- What is the one contract we could add a second column to this quarter, knowing that nothing will depend on it for a year?
Destiny — how it holds
- What would have to be true for the energy column still to be kept ten years from now by people who never met whoever started it?
- If our boundary widened without anyone deciding to widen it, who would notice, and what would they be looking at?
- What is the first sign that somebody has started treating the denominator as a currency — and what is the shortest way to show them the 409?
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Note on figures. Transformities, baselines, exergy factors, market spreads, energy intensities, the decoupling arithmetic and the kWh tranche are all computed in lib/verify/III_02.py and reproducible there, with every input printed beside its unit and its source, every assumption labelled ASSUMED, and every rounding used in this prose declared against its exact value. EROI figures and the solar-flux ratio are computed in Chapter I.01 and used here without being re-argued; the thermodynamic grounding of the Carnot factor is Chapter II.06.