- Email: [email protected]
Energy analysis — a verdict awaited
Energy analysis- a verdict awaited
The origins of energy analysis go back further than many people imagine, at least as far as the inter-war years, when the failure of the financial system to bring together unemployed men and unused resources led Nobel prize winner Sir Frederick Soddy to suggest energy as a more fundamental unit of account than money. Soddy's ideas were not well received at the time and it was not until the beginning of the present decade that the idea of analysing the economy in terms of energy was revived. The impetus came on the one hand, as did Soddy's, from a growing scepticism over conventional economic theories and on the other from the realisation that the pursuit of growth was rapidly pushing technology up against the finite nature of the world's resources. The idea came to be suggested that instead of energy being just one among several inputs into the economy, it was in fact the limiting input, determining the nature, speed and ultimately the extent of economic growth. The exact origins of this recrudescence are 'obscure' in the words of one prominent exponent, Malcolm Slesser, although by 1971 Howard Odum had published his influential and controversial 'Power, environment and society', in which he proposed that dollars and energy flow along the same paths but in opposite directions. About the same time Hirst and Herrendeen had begun working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Hirst on the energy costs of transport and Herrendeen on converting the 1963 input-output tables of the US e c o n o m y into a table expressed in energy terms (see p 268). Odum's work stimulated a number of people, among them Leach, Pimental and Slesser to examine the energy costs of food production while in the educational field Chapman, at the Open University, expanded a preliminary study of the energy inputs to containers to cover copper and aluminium production, recycling and, most notably, nuclear power (see p 299). Given these diverse origins it is hardly surprising that a number of quite distinct methodological approaches have been adopted. Very broadly these fall into two categories. Input-output analysis is based upon the matrix approach originally developed by Leontieff for economics. The flow of goods and services; expressed in energy terms rather than money, when put into the matrix, allows us to find the energy required to move from one sector of the economy to another. Process analysis, on the other hand, looks at an actual production process and tries to establish its energy and material inputs and outputs. In most processes a number of the inputs are themselves manufactured which means that the analysis has to go back along the production chain, feedback loops often connecting each part of the chain to one or more of the other parts. 266
ENERGY POLICY December 1975
Editorial comment In common with any other developing discipline there quickly arose ambiguities and inconsistancies in both methodology and interpretation. Attempts have been made to put energy analysis on a sound and uniform footing, notably by the two conferences held in Stockholm under the auspices of the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Studies, (IFIAS) but it is fair to say that a number of doubts still remain. Discussion of the merits of energy analysis tend to centre around three questions, not always separated in the minds of the participants in the debate. Briefly these are:
•
•
•
How useful, or valid, are the various methodological approaches and in particular what is the liklihood of agreement on a unified and consistent set of conventions upon which to base the discipline? What is the descriptive and/or normative potential of energy analysis and can it offer insights, or form the basis of decision making tools, superior to other disciplines? What part, if any, should it play in the formulation of policy on energy and technology?
Within the energy analysis camp controversy is at its most acute in the area of net energy analysis (NEA), ie the energy costs of energy. There are questions about the conventions, both in thermodynamic terms and over what inputs are legitimately to be counted as going in to the production of energy, which is equivalent to asking where the boundary is to be drawn between supplier and user. There are also doubts about its real usefulness, whether in the words of Leach it is a 'Heath Robinson sledgehammer to crack a nut,' and that its conclusions would either be overtaken by events, mainly economic or technological, outside its scope - or could be reached more quickly and easily by other methods. Attacks from outside have come mainly from economists who suspected, with some justice, the emergence of an 'energy theory of value' and the usurpation of their traditional role in the evaluation of social and industrial priorities. Certainly in the early days some claims of this sort were made but there has now been a fairly general disavowal of any normative function for energy analysis and agreement that it is a descriptive or 'cartographic' technique which can provide useful insights into processes but does not pretend to evaluate them. Nevertheless the normative charge is still being pressed by some economists (see Pearce and Webb p 318). They claim that energy analysis is being somewhat disingenuous in its disavowal, and that, for instance, to rank various projects simply in energy terms is to invite, implicitly, evaluation of them by a society increasingly sensitive to energy use. Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of agreement over even the basic methods and aims, energy analysis has been taken up by a number of institutional and governmental bodies, particularly in the USA where public law 93-577 now requires a mandatory net energy analysis of any new energy development. Clearly a consensus has to be reached fairly soon, if only to prevent endless litigation. The papers collected in this issue are Energy Policy's contribution to the debate. It cannot be said that they resolve all the issues - but at least they mention most of the questions. ENERGY POLICY December 1975
267
The origins of energy analysis go back further than many people imagine, at least as far as the inter-war years, when the failure of the financial system to bring together unemployed men and unused resources led Nobel prize winner Sir Frederick Soddy to suggest energy as a more fundamental unit of account than money. Soddy's ideas were not well received at the time and it was not until the beginning of the present decade that the idea of analysing the economy in terms of energy was revived. The impetus came on the one hand, as did Soddy's, from a growing scepticism over conventional economic theories and on the other from the realisation that the pursuit of growth was rapidly pushing technology up against the finite nature of the world's resources. The idea came to be suggested that instead of energy being just one among several inputs into the economy, it was in fact the limiting input, determining the nature, speed and ultimately the extent of economic growth. The exact origins of this recrudescence are 'obscure' in the words of one prominent exponent, Malcolm Slesser, although by 1971 Howard Odum had published his influential and controversial 'Power, environment and society', in which he proposed that dollars and energy flow along the same paths but in opposite directions. About the same time Hirst and Herrendeen had begun working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Hirst on the energy costs of transport and Herrendeen on converting the 1963 input-output tables of the US e c o n o m y into a table expressed in energy terms (see p 268). Odum's work stimulated a number of people, among them Leach, Pimental and Slesser to examine the energy costs of food production while in the educational field Chapman, at the Open University, expanded a preliminary study of the energy inputs to containers to cover copper and aluminium production, recycling and, most notably, nuclear power (see p 299). Given these diverse origins it is hardly surprising that a number of quite distinct methodological approaches have been adopted. Very broadly these fall into two categories. Input-output analysis is based upon the matrix approach originally developed by Leontieff for economics. The flow of goods and services; expressed in energy terms rather than money, when put into the matrix, allows us to find the energy required to move from one sector of the economy to another. Process analysis, on the other hand, looks at an actual production process and tries to establish its energy and material inputs and outputs. In most processes a number of the inputs are themselves manufactured which means that the analysis has to go back along the production chain, feedback loops often connecting each part of the chain to one or more of the other parts. 266
ENERGY POLICY December 1975
Editorial comment In common with any other developing discipline there quickly arose ambiguities and inconsistancies in both methodology and interpretation. Attempts have been made to put energy analysis on a sound and uniform footing, notably by the two conferences held in Stockholm under the auspices of the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Studies, (IFIAS) but it is fair to say that a number of doubts still remain. Discussion of the merits of energy analysis tend to centre around three questions, not always separated in the minds of the participants in the debate. Briefly these are:
•
•
•
How useful, or valid, are the various methodological approaches and in particular what is the liklihood of agreement on a unified and consistent set of conventions upon which to base the discipline? What is the descriptive and/or normative potential of energy analysis and can it offer insights, or form the basis of decision making tools, superior to other disciplines? What part, if any, should it play in the formulation of policy on energy and technology?
Within the energy analysis camp controversy is at its most acute in the area of net energy analysis (NEA), ie the energy costs of energy. There are questions about the conventions, both in thermodynamic terms and over what inputs are legitimately to be counted as going in to the production of energy, which is equivalent to asking where the boundary is to be drawn between supplier and user. There are also doubts about its real usefulness, whether in the words of Leach it is a 'Heath Robinson sledgehammer to crack a nut,' and that its conclusions would either be overtaken by events, mainly economic or technological, outside its scope - or could be reached more quickly and easily by other methods. Attacks from outside have come mainly from economists who suspected, with some justice, the emergence of an 'energy theory of value' and the usurpation of their traditional role in the evaluation of social and industrial priorities. Certainly in the early days some claims of this sort were made but there has now been a fairly general disavowal of any normative function for energy analysis and agreement that it is a descriptive or 'cartographic' technique which can provide useful insights into processes but does not pretend to evaluate them. Nevertheless the normative charge is still being pressed by some economists (see Pearce and Webb p 318). They claim that energy analysis is being somewhat disingenuous in its disavowal, and that, for instance, to rank various projects simply in energy terms is to invite, implicitly, evaluation of them by a society increasingly sensitive to energy use. Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of agreement over even the basic methods and aims, energy analysis has been taken up by a number of institutional and governmental bodies, particularly in the USA where public law 93-577 now requires a mandatory net energy analysis of any new energy development. Clearly a consensus has to be reached fairly soon, if only to prevent endless litigation. The papers collected in this issue are Energy Policy's contribution to the debate. It cannot be said that they resolve all the issues - but at least they mention most of the questions. ENERGY POLICY December 1975
267