System Energy Assessment (SEA), Defining a Standard Measure of EROI for Energy Businesses as Whole Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces System Energy Assessment (SEA), a novel method for objectively measuring the true energy productivity of businesses by accounting for hidden 'dark energy' in outsourced services, and proposes a standard EROI measure for energy businesses.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive framework for assessing business energy needs as self-managing systems, correcting for uncounted outsourced energy demands, and defining a physical measure of EROI for energy businesses.

Findings

Dark energy constitutes up to 80% of total embodied energy in businesses.

Current methods underestimate business energy needs by ignoring outsourced services.

The proposed SEA method provides a more accurate, physical basis for energy productivity measurement.

Abstract

A more objective method for measuring the energy needs of businesses, System Energy Assessment (SEA), identifies the natural boundaries of businesses as self-managing net-energy systems, of controlled and self-managing parts. The method is demonstrated using a model Wind Farm case study, and applied to defining a true physical measure of its energy productivity for society (EROI-S), the global ratio of energy produced to energy cost. The traceable needs of business technology are combined with assignable energy needs for all other operating services. That serves to correct a large natural gap in energy use information. Current methods count traceable energy receipts for technology use. Self-managing services employed by businesses outsource their own energy needs to operate, and leave no records to trace. Those uncounted energy demands are often 80% of the total embodied energy of business end products. The scale of this "dark energy" was discovered from differing global accounts, and corrected so the average energy cost per dollar for businesses would equal the world average energy use per dollar of GDP. Presently the energy needs of paid services that outsource their own energy needs are counted for lack of information to be "0". Our default assumption is to treat them as "average". The result is to assign total energy use and impacts to the demand for energy services, for a "Scope 4" GHG assessment level. Counting only the energy uses of technology understates the energy needs of business services, as if services were more energy efficient than technology. The result confirms a similar finding by Hall et. al. in 1981 [9]. We use exhaustive search for what a business needs to operate as a whole, locating a natural physical boundary for its working parts, to define businesses as physical rather than statistical subjects of science. :measurement, natural systems