Our living planet is facing serious environmental problems, e.g., energy crisis, etc. The first step to effectively control these problems is to accurately evaluate and characterize them.

In this research, elergy is proposed as a nature-centered energy consumption indicator to evaluate all the direct and indirect energy required to produce a product during its life cycle. Its results are expressed in kWh of specified electricity-equivalent. Two derived indicators, ECR (Elergy-CED Ratio) and El-PBT (Elergy Pay Back Time), are introduced to evaluate product's energy efficiency. Elergy trading is presented as a 'permit trading' to control energy crisis, economically.

Elergy is calculated for 231 raw materials. Four case studies are performed where elergy results are compared with...[ Read more ]

Our living planet is facing serious environmental problems, e.g., energy crisis, etc. The first step to effectively control these problems is to accurately evaluate and characterize them.

In this research, elergy is proposed as a nature-centered energy consumption indicator to evaluate all the direct and indirect energy required to produce a product during its life cycle. Its results are expressed in kWh of specified electricity-equivalent. Two derived indicators, ECR (Elergy-CED Ratio) and El-PBT (Elergy Pay Back Time), are introduced to evaluate product's energy efficiency. Elergy trading is presented as a 'permit trading' to control energy crisis, economically.

Elergy is calculated for 231 raw materials. Four case studies are performed where elergy results are compared with those of traditional indicators. Cross-case comparisons are made with the dimensionless and functional-unit-irrelevant ECR.

Compared to the most used indicator CED which evaluates embodied energy from a human-centered perspective, elergy evaluates the entire energy extracted from the Nature and evaluates the eventual effect made to our living planet.

Compared to the first nature-centered indicator emergy, elergy is much easier to calculate as its allocation rules and raw material library are compatible with LCA software and database.

As electricity is daily used and traded energy, elergy results are closer to local life and are much easier to understand for general public than emergy results; as people have been used to pay for electricity, the market does not need to be 'educated' to pay for 'another bill' like carbon trading.

All these advantages make elergy a comprehensive and easy-to-promote indicator. In the near future of industrial 4.0 and big data era, with help of IOT system, elergy will certainly be a perfect indicator to help regulators to identify and promote environmentally friendly products, to make proper and practical policies, and to implement market-driven sustainability education.