Energy Slave - Energy Expenditure

Energy Expenditure

As a very simple example, ten apple pickers descend from their trees and walk to the processing shed with their apples, and then return to their trees. They have produced some number of units of work. Ten other apple pickers unload their apples into an empty box, and then return to picking. The box, now full, is carried by a field tractor to the processing shed. The work of these ten pickers plus the driver of the tractor plus all of the energy inputs have also produced that number of units of work.

The energy inputs include the life cycle share of the energy required to build and maintain that tractor and the box (called "embodied energy"), plus the fuel required to run it for the time occupied by bringing, placing, idling, and returning that box to the shed, plus the energy required to acquire, process, transport, and distribute that energy (more embedded energy).

The energy used in the two systems is not defined to be equal. The ratio of the energy used to produce an energy slave’s volume of work, through machine labour, as opposed to the energy used to produce a unit of human labor, is one of the most salient questions implicitly raised by this concept.

If we let Lw the Labour of walkers, Ln the labour of non-walkers, Ld the labour of driver, Ei the Non-human energy inputs, C the Constant to convert units of energy into units of work. Further, let 1 Ph be one person-hour.

Then given what has been said above

And therefore, since the human labour inputs equate to the energy slave units

Supposing then that work is measured in Person-hours, and supposing further that the walkers require half an hour each to go to the shed and back, that both groups take 6 minutes to fill their apple pouches, and the driver takes 30 minutes to go to and return from the shed:

Therefore

The Energy inputs (times the constant) replace 4.5 person-hours of labor. Returning to the original definition, an energy slave is the energy required to produce a unit of human labour otherwise than organically, so we need to convert these 4.5 person-hours into energy slaves.

In the original example, ten laborers produced their all-human work output in six hours. The other labourers plus their machines produced the same work in 1.5 hours of human labor. Therefore the energy slaves replaced 4.5/6.0 hours of human productivity, and there are 7.5 Energy Slaves.

The question “How many energy slaves do I have?” is answered by looking at the amount of energy required to build and drive the infrastructure to support your life style, multiplied by Slaves per unit of energy . This would be expressed as