Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: reifying energy



Hi Folks --

1) Energy is a thing, according to the usual definitions of
"energy" and "thing". To say otherwise is not only bad
pedagogy, it's flat-out wrong. For details see
http://www.monmouth.com/~jsd/physics/reality-reductionism.htm

2) The question of what we are paying for when we buy
"electricity" is an interesting question, and an important
question. But it is only very tangentially related to
whether or not energy is a thing.

Above all, we should realize that it is a microeconomics
question, not a physics question. If your favorite tool
is a hammer, don't imagine that everything is a nail. If
your favorite subject is physics and you're good at physics,
don't imagine that every question is a physics question.

Fundamentally, we pay the electric company to provide a
service. The price of such a service depends on many
factors, including at a bare minimum:
1) Value: How much is the service worth to customers?
2) Cost: How much does the service cost to produce?
Cost in turn depends on
a) Fuel costs, which scale roughly like total energy,
b) Fixed costs, which scale roughly like _peak power_.
3) Price should be somewhere between cost and value,
but just where depends on things like
a) Competition
b) Market segmentation
c) Price-fixing, fraud, and market manipulation by
Enron and others, as Californians found out last
summer.

For additional remarks on microeconomics, see:
http://lists.nau.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9910&L=phys-l&P=R5884