Sustainability 2011 , 3
1919
How we proceed with presenting the method is a little more involved than one would need to use in
practice. For demonstration we identify six organizational scales, and go step by step asking what else
each needs to operate, assessing and combining energy values for traceable technology (TE) and
individually untraceable economic services (EE). We start from the LCA estimate for the energy needs
of the principle capital investment technology for the wind farm as the first value of TE that we call
LCAE , and consider the smallest whole working unit needed for the wind farm. The technologies of
the supply chain businesses are passive equipment that can’t operate by itself, though, without the
employees and the other business services to operate those businesses. When we add energy use
estimates for the active self-managing parts a combination of parts that could operate by itself results,
the supply chain, that we call SEA0. Then we ask the same question again.
What we first find is that the principal technology of a wind farm needs a field operation to control
and maintain it, and so we add to the accumulating total the needs for those operations and services
calling it SEA1. We then do the same to add the operation costs of the wind farm’s business office to
make SEA2 and the costs of its corporate management to make SEA3. That completes the set of
internal units of organization and business costs to account for. We then assess the energy needs that a
business will pay for to maintain the external business environment, that we call SEA4, paying for
financing costs and taxes to be used by government (Figure 4).
Figure 4. System Energy Assessment (SEA) combines technology energy use (TE1 to TE4)
with energy use for economic services (EE1 to EE4), searching for all the needed energy
uses for all the scales of operating units of the whole working business system.LCAE: Energy use of technology supply chain measured by LCA; SEA0: adding the energy cost of
supply chain economic services; SEA1: adding the energy needs for field operations; SEA2: adding
energy needs for business management; SEA3: adding energy needs for corporate management;
SEA4: adding energy needs for environmental services, the costs of society, taxes, finance.