Coming Soon | Calibrating Energy, Mass, and Money Stocks and Flows within the Human and Resources with MONEY Economic Growth Model
This article is in preparation.
To effectively model the relationships between energy and economic outcomes (e.g., gross domestic product, employment, wages, and debt) it is useful to have economic frameworks that consistently merge the physical, energetic, and financial perspectives of the economy within a dynamic model. The Human and Resources with MONEY (HARMONEY) model is one such framework that uses and input-output structure and is stock and flow consistent in money, energy, and mass. One research goal is to provide a replicable method to calibrate such macroeconomic growth models blending research from industrial ecology, energy analysis, and economics. This paper summarizes the effort to calibrate the HARMONEY model framework to the United States economy divided into seventeen productive sectors plus the household and government sectors. To do this, we have allocated approximately 100 gigatonnes of mass stock in the U.S. economy among fifteen categories of capital, such as roads, buildings, and power plants. HARMONEY models the energy consumption, as fuel, for each type of capital, and we summarize that calibration procedure for the approximately 100 exajoules per year of primary energy consumption of coal, natural gas, oil and refined products, and primary electricity. From these calibrations, we estimate the annual direct energy consumption per mass (MJ/kg) of each type of capital ranges from approximately 0.4 for pipelines, 1-2 for homes and commercial buildings, 40-100 for road vehicles, and about 300 as dissipated electricity in the electric grid.
Image: Dominik Lückmann on Unsplash
