ABSTRACT
The lack of clear consensus in the community of energy analysts about how to perform and use energy analysis is probably one of the explanations for the rapid decline of interest in energy analysis in the 1990s. If it is true that there is a general agreement about the existence of a link between energy and society, it is also true that so far, attempts to quantify this link have not delivered simple and easy-to-use analytical tools. ‘Indeed, the scientists in this field … were forced to admit that using energy as a numeraire to describe and analyse changes in the characteristics of ecological and socio-economic systems proved to be more complicated than one had anticipated’ (Giampietro and Ulgiati, 2005).
