ABSTRACT
In this chapter we first resort to traditional economic accounting (section 4.1) to examine in general the required characteristics of a sound accounting protocol and the criteria for choosing relevant semantic and formal categories. We then apply this information to national energy accounting and define four relevant semantic categories of energy forms, these are: primary energy sources, gross energy requirement, (net) energy carriers, and end uses, each referring to a differ-ent scale and narrative about energy conversions (section 4.2, page 67). We then justify our choice of these semantic categories by showing their usefulness in national energy accounting. To this purpose we provide a critical appraisal of several dubious practices common in national energy accounting: (i) linear repre-sentations of energy flows (in the form of flow-charts), (ii) use of a single variable for quantifying energy forms belonging to different semantic categories, and (iii) use of a single temporal scale (section 4.3, page 79). Building on the shortcom-ings of these existing conceptualizations of national energy accounting, we propose a new conceptual approach to energy flow accounting based on the concept of autopoiesis (section 4.4, page 82).
