Valuing Energy
A 10 000 joule note as issued to children attending Future World: The Energy Question course I ran during the 1990s. There were also 1000 and 100 000 joule notes. The children earned these notes as payment for physical work.
Can a monetary value be ascribed to a joule? Are you able to say how much work a twelve year old would have had to do to be paid a 10 000 joule note?
Are you, in other words, energy literate? Do you understand the value of energy?
Quest for the Energy Monster
~Chapter One~
Hello? Hello! Mum? Dad? Sarah?
Something was up. The front door was open, the house was in complete darkness and there was an eerie silence. It wasn't our turn for power rationing this week and Mum's last words this morning had definitely be "Be home by six, your supper will be on the table."
My heart began to thump loudly. Maybe we'd had burglars. Maybe somebody'd broken in. Maybe my family had been . . . I pushed the thought out of my mind. They'd probably just gone for a walk. But why was the front door open? I pressed the hall light switch. Nothing happened. It definitely wasn't our turn for power rationing this week, so why wasn't anything working?
Read the rest of the opening chapter of a story written for twelve-year-olds attending FutureWorld: The Energy Question
Remember that if you are now an adult in your forties, you could have have been one of those twelve-year-olds!
In 1997, the parents of those twelve-year-olds were paying around 8p per kilowatt hour for their electricity.
Their children attending the course calculated that they should have been paying £227.30 per kilowatt hour.
Insane? Completely divorced from any reality?
Click the programme to find out what went on at FutureWorld, and how the figure of £227.30 (£1098.95 at today's prices) was arrived at.
The Eternal Surcharge
Quite clearly nobody anywhere in the world is ever going to be paying anything remotely like £1098 per kWh for electricity. The idea is no less absurd than climate change denial! But that is not the point. This was an exercise in awareness raising. The awareness we all need is that, since the Industrial Revolution humanity has extracted something like 1 × 10²² joules (about ten sextillion) of energy deposited by the Sun in coal alone, let alone the other fossil fuels. We may chose to ignore the real value of this in terms of physical work by biological creatures, but we have made a huge withdrawal from the bank and nature is going to enforce repayment.. Rising generations are are not going to be able to avoid effectively a huge surcharge added to their electricity bills in the form of:
-
Migration and relocation costs
-
Massive flood defence and water storage projects
-
Upgrading housing stock (including passive and active cooling)
-
Infrastructure renewal (perhaps including moving whole towns)
-
Lost productivity (OECD estimate of $1.1 trillion in 2024 and rising rapidly)
-
Lost Human lives (how are these to be valued?)
-
A once infinitely marvellous and beautiful planet (written off).
Can this debt ever be fully repaid? Highly unlikely, but upcoming generations are going to have to start footing the bill and it may or may not help for them to understand that they are paying the true cost of the energy previous generations have used.
Click here or the picture to read about another awareness raising exercise on Flat Holm Island
Negawatts and Killerwatts
A small, energy monster mower.
Rated at 1.3 kilowatts
Right wing politicians justify cheap energy prices on the grounds of "growth", "competitiveness" and increased wealth for those individuals able to get it.
Left wing politicians (and the Climate Change Committee) justify cheap energy prices on the grounds of helping the poor and promoting transition to energy saving technologies such as heat pumps or E transport
Both are wrong! (IHMO!)
Click to read about negawatts and killerjoules.
A small, munch line energy mower.
How many killerwatts?