Understanding the Value of Energy

To decry the use of Fossil Fuels or nuclear energy (See ‘Pricing and Taxation policy – fuels and other enablers’), is also, again being selectively short-sighted. Let us again draw from Matt Ridley’s statistics to better explain this point. Humans have four basic needs – food, clothing, shelter and fuel/energy. However, it is the availability and lower cost of energy and improved industrialization/automation that enables greater production of food, clothing and shelter and hence, made them markedly cheaper over the past two centuries. This allows for more disposable income to spend on other things and luxuries.

The Value of Artificial Light

Artificial light lies on the border between necessity and luxury. In monetary terms, the same amount of artificial lighting cost 20,000 times as much in England in the year 1300 as it does today. In labour terms the change is even more dramatic and the improvement even more recent.

Ask how much artificial light you can earn with an hour of work at the average wage:1750 BC (sesame oil lamp) – 24 lumen hours, 1800 AD (candle – 186 lumen hours, 1880 AD (kerosene lamp) – 4,400 lumen hours,1950 AD (incandescent bulb) – 5, 31,000 lumen hours, 2000 AD (compact fluorescent) – 8.40 million lumen hours.

Today (LEDs) about 20 million lumen hours

TIME as a Measure of Cost

Put another way, an hour of work today earns you 600 days’ worth of reading light, while in 1800 you would have got only 10 minutes or, if comparing the effort of work involved to earn an hour of reading light, say that of an 18-watt compact fluorescent bulb. Today LED’s offer even more

Today – an hour of light with an LED bulb costs less than quarter of a second working wages.

From six hours in the 1800’s to quarter of a second today – an 86,400- fold improvement for an hour’s lighting: that is how much better of you are than your ancestors were then. This uses the currency that really counts – your TIME! also, these numbers do not include the convenience, the lack of smoke, smell and flicker and its lesser fire hazard.

This gives you the choice to spend less time working for light and thus have more time to do other things for yourself or others – this is economic progress. Similar progress is also, evident in the work time required to procure other necessities.

In 1908, an average American had to work 4700 hours to earn enough to buy a Model – T Ford car. In 2008 wages for 1365 hours work was sufficient to buy a typical modern and better car.

TIME is the ultimate KEY measure of a thing’s worth!

Raw materials and energy can also, be reduced to an equivalent value of Time. To efficiently and effectively make use of time you need a source of energy, not only to provide you artificial light to increase your working hours, but also, to provide you the means to multiply your physical output. Raw materials too can be costed in terms of the energy required to extract and process them into useful products and then again costed into an equivalent value of time saved and made available to you.

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