Aspects of Energy Resource Management

Doctoral thesis, 1999

Energy resource management requires input from many disciplines. The three first papers in this thesis deals with the use of physical terms in the interdisciplinary process where inputs from different disciplines are handled together. The paper On the Combined Use of Economic and Physical Concepts provides one analysis why problems arise as people with different disciplinary background use identical terms, but refer to different concepts. Suggestions are made on how to avoid unnecessary problems in such dialogues. In Measuring Instrumental Values in Energy Terms some suggested energy based measures of value are structured and the limits of their usefulness are illustrated and discussed. Entropy and Economic Processes - A Physicist's Perspective describes the physical entropy concept and reviews its economic relevance in relation to the interpretation made by the economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. The societal use of materials requires energy. That connection may have implications that are relevant when forming economic environmental policy. In An Environmental Tax-shift with Indirect Desirable Effects we present possible consequences of that relation as a secondary argument in favour of taxing external costs of the energy sector. The importance of institutional factors relating customers to the physical energy system is illustrated in Electricity from a Competitive Market in Life-Cycle Analysis. We describe the new opportunity for electricity consumers to assume responsibility for the electricity production they pay for as electricity markets become competitive. In the following two papers the possibilities to utilise bio-energy is analysed in relation to one economic model and one set of ecological and socio-economic criteria, used by other scientists to rule out large scale use of bio-energy. We show that large-scale use of bio-energy cannot be ruled out by these arguments. Finally there is a paper reporting a simple analysis of Energy Use in Personal Rapid Transit in Sweden where the potential resource efficiency is illustrated of a light weight, computer controlled system, offering individual journeys.