Abstract
A more objective method for measuring the energy needs of businesses, System Energy Assessment (SEA), measures the combined impacts of material supply chains and service supply chains, to assess businesses as whole self-managing net-energy systems. The method is demonstrated using a model Wind Farm, and defines a physical measure of their energy productivity for society (EROI-S), a ratio of total energy delivered to total energy expended. Energy use records for technology and proxy measures for clearly understood but not individually recorded energy uses for services are combined for a whole system estimate of consumption required for production. Current methods count only energy needs for technology. Business services outsource their own energy needs to operate, leaving no traceable record. That uncounted business energy demand is often 80% of the total, an amount of “dark energy” hidden from view, discovered by finding the average energy estimated needs for businesses far below the world average energy consumed per dollar of GDP. Presently for lack of information the energy needs of business services are counted to be “0”. Our default assumption is to treat them as “average”. The result is a hard measure of total business demand for energy services, a “Scope 4” energy use or GHG impact assessment. Counting recorded energy uses and discounting unrecorded ones misrepresents labor intensive work as highly energy efficient. The result confirms a similar finding by Hall et al. in 1981 [1]. We use exhaustive search for what a business needs to operate as a whole, tracing internal business relationships rather than energy data, to locate its natural physical boundary as a working unit, and so define a business as a physical rather than statistical subject of scientific study. See also online resource materials and notes [2].
Highlights
One of the more difficult problems encountered in measuring the energy consumed in producing energy (EROI) [1,3] is deciding what contributing energy costs to count
As more of the needed business operations are counted from SEA0 to SEA3, and we count costs further removed from the high cost heart of the business operation, we find a succession of smaller changes in the partial estimates of EROI (Figure 6,7,8)
The standard Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is well defined for assessing the traceable energy costs of business, associated with technology
Summary
One of the more difficult problems encountered in measuring the energy consumed in producing energy (EROI) [1,3] is deciding what contributing energy costs to count It has been a long discussed question whether to include the energy costs of supporting employees along with the fuel uses for various production technologies, as some other ecological economists have explored [1,3,4,5]. We illustrated our approach using the model business plan for a Texas wind farm from our first study [7] We assess both the traceable and the untraceable energy needs, based on whether they are required for the business to operate, and compare the totals. Values of EROIS as the total energy costs of energy for different businesses, technologies and societies are, are comparable like any other well defined physical measure such as heat or weight. EROIT for labor intensive energy production, for example, would appear high compared to energy obtained with sophisticated technology, just because the energy costs for labor are not counted
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