Matthew Kuperus Heun

Learnable lessons on sustainability from the provision of electricity in South Africa

South Africa is a “canary in a coal mine” for the world’s upcoming ecological crises, especially regarding electrical energy provision for a developing modern society, because aspects of the South African situation may be repeated elsewhere when ecological limits constrain economic activity. We describe the South African context in terms of social issues and economic development policies, environmental issues, and the electrical energy situation in the country. We explore implications of the South African context for the provision of electrical energy in terms of development objectives, climate change, the electrical grid, water, and solar, wind, ocean, and hydro energy resources. Thereafter, we explore future directions for electrical energy provision in the country, including some important questions to be answered. Next, we offer a rational way forward, including an assessment favoring concentrated solar power (CSP) as a path of least resistance for decoupling South Africa’s energy use from upstream and downstream environmental impacts. We conclude with some learnable lessons from the South African context for the rest of the developing and developed world.© 2010 ASME

Analysis of the Performance of Earthship Housing in Various Global Climates

Earthships are houses that use walls of recycled automobile tires packed with soil to retain a berm on three sides of the home while glazing on the sunny side (south in the Northern Hemisphere, north in the Southern Hemisphere) allows solar heat into the home’s interior. This paper discusses the design and application of earthships and assesses the feasibility of earthships as sustainable and healthy places of residence. The paper begins by describing the aspects of earthship design which contribute to sustainability, including the construction of the thermal envelope and its effect on the thermal comfort of the occupants; the building’s ability to harness renewable energy; and the catchwater and water reuse system. Each of these aspects is analyzed with computer models that simulate homes in four distinct climate zones to determine (a) whether the design meets the comfort, electrical, and water demand for each location, and (b) the financial implications for construction and operation of an earthship in each location in comparison with a standard wood-frame house. The study shows that earthships are a financially feasible design alternative for dry/arid, humid continental, and continental sub-arctic climates; but are not feasible for tropical wet/dry

Introduction: The End of an Era

We are entering a new era in which biophysical limits related to natural resource extraction rates and the biospheres waste assimilation capacity are becoming binding constraints on mature economies. Unfortunately, the data needed for policy-makers to understand and manage economic growth in the new era are not universally available. In this chapter, we discuss the problems that arise from relying solely on the Solow growth model to describe an economy that is, in reality, deeply interconnected with the biosphere. We point out that mainstream economists forecast low growth rates for mature economies for the foreseeable future, because traditional drivers of economic growth (growth rates of capital and labor productivity) have plateaued. Unfortunately, mainstream policy recommendations to reinvigorate growth, based on the Solow growth model, ignore three critical realities: the economy is tightly coupled to the biosphere, there exist real and binding physical and technological limits to the rate at which materials and energy can be extracted from the biosphere, and today’s emplacement of manufactured capital locks in tomorrow’s material and energy demands from the biosphere. As such, mainstream policy recommendations are likely to fail in the long run: today’s expansion of the stock of capital in the economy in the hopes of enhancing consumption can contribute to the slowdown of economic growth by bringing us ever-closer to biophysical limits. The chapter ends by noting that we need a new way to understand our economy, and we suggest that detailed information about materials, energy, embodied energy, and energy intensity be routinely gathered and analyzed and disseminated from a centralized location to provide markets and policymakers with more-complete knowledge of the biophysical economy.

Stocks and Flows of Economic Value

To quantify financial activities and interdependencies within an economy, economists account for flows of economic value among sectors of the economy. In this chapter, we utilize the prevailing subjective theory of value to develop a framework for value accounting that is consistent with the materials, energy, and embodied energy accounting frameworks presented in prior chapters. We note that important and essential material exchanges between the economy and the biosphere (including energy extraction from the biosphere and waste assimilation by the biosphere) take place outside of the market, and, as such, they are not included in national accounts and have no economic value. We point to the UN System of Environmental Economic Accounts (SEEA) or the US Integrated Environmental Economic Satellite Accounts (IEESA) as the way forward to including some of these essential extra-market transactions in national accounting. Similar to previous chapters, a series of increasingly-disaggregated model economies is used to develop our value accounting framework. Value flows for the US auto industry are presented, and concerns are raised about recent changes to include intangible assets, such as software and intellectual property, as capital stock.

Stocks and Flows of Materials

The first step in understanding the economic metabolism is to account for the flow of materials through the economy and the exchange of materials with the biosphere. In this chapter, we develop a framework for accounting material flows and accumulation within economies. We begin by considering accounting in everyday life and continue with concepts from thermodynamics, such as system boundaries, control volumes, and the First Law of Thermodynamics, to develop a rigorous accounting framework. The framework is applied first to a one-sector then two-sector model of the economy as we construct a general framework for material accounting. We then apply the framework to the real-world example of the US auto industry.

Accounting for the Wealth of Nations

Mainstream economic models, which typically exclude physical transactions between the economy and the biosphere, are incomplete: wastes, pollution, natural resource extraction, and use of ecosystem services are not included. When economic policy is informed by these incomplete models, unexpected negative outcomes can arise. In this chapter, we suggest that the reason for the incompleteness of mainstream economic models is that we incorrectly understand the economy through the outdated metaphor of the economy as a machine. We describe three eras of thinking about the economy, its relationship to the biosphere, and the metaphors that emerged during each era. We argue that as the world enters the age of resource depletion, it is time for a new metaphor: the economy is society’s \emph{metabolism}. We describe the metabolic processes of anabolism, catabolism, and autophagy and draw analogies to key economic processes: capital formation, energy production, and recycling. Based on the machine metaphor, today’s economic policies are unable to address important issues such as appropriate levels and types of capital formation, efficient energy production, wise use of recycling, and the appropriate scale of the economy relative to the biosphere. The problem is compounded by today’s national accounting, which fails to count many beneficial activities in GDP, simply because because GDP measures only what is produced. Thus, wise and beneficial long-term decisions that would that preserve or enhance natural capital (such as refraining from clearcutting forests) might, ultimately, reduce GDP. We conclude that navigating through the age of resource depletion will require expanded national accounting that captures robust, annual data on the entire portfolio of a nation’s wealth (manufactured and natural capital) in addition to data on national income (GDP). The chapter ends with a description of the structure of the rest of the book.

Stocks and Flows of Embodied Energy

In addition to materials and direct energy, accounting for embodied energy is essential to understand how the biophysical economy operates, because it provides an indication of the distribution of intra-economy energy demand created by consumption of goods and services. Furthermore, the energy embodied in manufactured capital provides, to first approximation, an estimate of the energy required to replace depreciated capital. This chapter begins by developing, for the first time in the literature, a rigorous, thermodynamically-based definition of embodied energy. We then show that energy embodied in the products of an economic sector is the sum of all direct energy consumed along the supply chain, including all upstream processing stages. We note that waste heat from a sector is additive to the energy embodied within products of a sector, thereby providing the mechanism for accumulating embodied energy along the manufacturing supply chain. Equations that describe the accumulation and flow of embodied energy through economies are developed through a series of increasingly-disaggregated model economies. Finally, we discuss embodied energy in the context of our running example, the US auto industry. We find that there are very few estimates in the literature of energy embodied within automobiles.

Flows of Direct Energy

Accounting for direct energy as it flows through an economy is essential for developing a dynamic picture of its metabolism. In this chapter, we apply the First Law of Thermodynamics to sectors of the economy to describe flows of direct energy from the biosphere, through economies, and ultimately back to the biosphere as waste heat. Direct energy accounting equations are developed through a series of example economies with increasing levels of disaggregation. Finally, direct energy flows for the example of the US auto industry are discussed.