Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Energy Standard: What Backs Money When Labor Dies?
Or: A century of brilliant thinkers have proposed energy-backed currency. None of them solved the deflationary paradox. Here’s why it matters now more than ever.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Here’s an uncomfortable thought experiment.
Imagine it’s 2035. AI agents handle 50% of knowledge work. Humanoid robots stock warehouses, pour concrete, and assemble circuit boards. Structural unemployment in the OECD hovers around 25%. Corporate profits are record-breaking—but fewer humans earn wages, which means fewer humans pay taxes, which means government revenue is collapsing.
Now ask: what is the dollar actually worth?
Not philosophically. Practically. The dollar’s value rests on a chain of promises: the government promises to accept it for taxes; it can collect taxes because citizens earn income; citizens earn income because the economy employs them. Break any link and the chain doesn’t hold.
We’re watching the middle link dissolve in real time. The labor cliff data documents 1.17 million U.S. layoffs in 2025 while GDP grew. Companies aren’t shrinking. They’re substituting—permanently replacing human labor with machine labor. The tax base doesn’t just shrink; it transforms from something the government can tax (wages) into something it struggles to tax (capital deployed across borders at the speed of light).
The Bootstrap Paradox identified this as the first of four interlocking problems: the Transition Trusts that fund post-scarcity infrastructure need a store of value that doesn’t depreciate alongside the economy they’re replacing. Holding dollars is holding a claim on a shrinking pie.
The proposed solution was the Energy Standard—tokens backed by kilowatt-hours of production capacity. But I was honest about the caveat: this is the most speculative mechanism in the framework. Energy-backed currencies have been proposed for over a century. None has achieved meaningful adoption.
So let’s do what serious analysis requires: dig into the history, understand what worked and what didn’t, confront the paradoxes honestly, and determine whether the Energy Standard is a genuine solution or a clever-sounding dead end.
A Brief History of Backing Money with Stuff
The gold era: what commodity money actually looked like
For most of the modern era, money was backed by a physical commodity. The logic was simple: gold is scarce, durable, divisible, and difficult to counterfeit. A dollar represented a fixed weight of gold. You could walk into a bank and exchange paper for metal.
The Gold Standard Act of 1900 fixed the U.S. dollar at 25.8 grains of 90% pure gold—equivalent to $20.67 per troy ounce. This price held for 33 years. Central banks redeemed paper currency for gold coin on demand. The system was stable, predictable, and deeply constraining.
Bretton Woods (1944) updated the arrangement. Delegates from 44 Allied nations fixed the dollar to gold at $35 per troy ounce. All other currencies pegged to the dollar. Only foreign central banks could redeem dollars for gold—not private citizens. The system created the IMF and the World Bank and underpinned the postwar economic order for 27 years.
Then, on August 15, 1971, Nixon closed the gold window. U.S. gold reserves had fallen to 10,000 metric tonnes—less than half their peak. The “temporary” suspension became permanent. The dollar became pure fiat: backed by nothing except the government’s promise to accept it for taxes.
Here’s what matters for our purposes: the gold standard didn’t fail because commodity-backing is a bad idea. It failed because gold supply couldn’t keep pace with economic growth. When economies grow faster than the gold supply, you get deflation—falling prices, rising real debt burdens, and economic contraction. The gold discoveries of California (1848), South Africa (1886), and the Klondike (1896) caused inflationary surges. Periods of stable gold supply caused devastating deflation that amplified recessions.
The lesson: a commodity-backed currency is only as stable as the commodity’s supply trajectory. If supply is erratic, the currency is erratic. If supply outpaces demand, you get deflation. If demand outpaces supply, you get deflation of a different kind—the currency appreciates until economic activity chokes.
File this away. We’ll need it when we get to the paradox.
The visionaries who saw it coming
The idea of backing money with energy—rather than gold—has a surprisingly distinguished intellectual pedigree.
Frederick Soddy (1926). The Nobel laureate in Chemistry (1921, for work on radioactive substances) published Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt in 1926. His core insight: real wealth derives from the use of energy to transform materials into useful goods. Money and debt are “virtual wealth”—mathematical fictions subject to compound interest but not to thermodynamics. Real wealth decays (entropy); debt compounds (mathematics). The divergence between these two trajectories is the source of every financial crisis.
Soddy was largely ignored by economists in his time. His ideas later became foundational to ecological economics—a field that still operates at the margins of the discipline.
Howard Scott and the Technocracy Movement (1930s). During the Great Depression, engineer Howard Scott proposed replacing money with Energy Certificates denominated in joules. The total certificate supply would equal the nation’s net energy budget, distributed equally among the population. The key design features were radical: certificates expired at the end of each accounting period (preventing hoarding), were tied to individual ID (preventing transfer), and unused certificates became void.
Scott’s vision—apolitical engineers managing a thermodynamically balanced economy with a 20-hour work week—attracted millions of followers before fading as the New Deal provided a less radical response to the Depression.
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison (1921). In December 1921, two of America’s most famous inventors visited the Muscle Shoals hydroelectric project in Alabama and proposed something remarkable: the government should issue $40 million in currency backed not by gold but by the energy-producing capacity of the dam itself.
Edison’s argument, published in the New York Times on December 6, 1921: “If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.” In 1922, Edison extended the idea to a commodity basket backed by 36 agricultural products. The proposal was never adopted.
Buckminster Fuller (1969). Fuller proposed a Global Energy Grid interconnecting U.S. and Russian power systems via the Bering Straits, alongside a metabolic currency based on electricity. The grid would enable 24/7 load balancing across time zones, effectively doubling operating capacity. Fuller’s concept later influenced Bob Swann’s 1974 essay “Appropriate Currency,” which argued energy is “best suited to serve as the world’s universal measure of value.”
Bernard Lietaer’s Terra (2001). Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer proposed the most sophisticated energy-adjacent currency: the Terra, a Trade Reference Currency backed by a standardized basket of 9-12 commodities (oil, copper, gold, silver, coffee, cocoa, etc.). The critical innovation was a demurrage fee of 3.5-4% per annum—a negative carrying cost that discourages hoarding and encourages circulation. The Terra was designed as a complement to national currencies, not a replacement.
Each of these thinkers identified the same fundamental insight: energy is the universal input to all economic activity. Everything humans produce—food, shelter, clothing, computation, transportation—requires energy transformation. If you want a currency backed by something real and universally useful, energy is the obvious candidate.
So why hasn’t it worked?
The Failures: SolarCoin and the Adoption Graveyard
The most concrete modern attempt at an energy-backed currency is SolarCoin, launched in 2014. It rewarded solar energy production at 1 SLR per megawatt-hour of verified solar generation.
At peak adoption (2017-2018), SolarCoin had over 10,000 solar installations participating across 54 countries. ACWA Power in Saudi Arabia became the first large-scale utility to adopt it. IRENA and Solar Power Europe endorsed it. The token hit an all-time high of $2.64 on January 14, 2018, during the broader crypto bull market.
Today, SolarCoin’s market cap is approximately $3.5 million. The price has collapsed to near zero. The project isn’t dead—the website is active—but it’s functionally irrelevant.
What went wrong? Three things:
1. The chicken-and-egg problem. A currency is only useful if people accept it. People only accept it if it’s useful. SolarCoin never achieved the critical mass of merchants, exchanges, and users needed to bootstrap a functioning monetary ecosystem. You could earn SolarCoins by generating solar power—but you couldn’t buy groceries with them.
2. The verification problem. Linking tokens to physical energy production requires verifiable data from millions of installations. Getting solar producers to share generation data proved harder than expected. Trust in the verification process never reached institutional grade.
3. The fundamental identity crisis. Was SolarCoin a currency, a reward program, or an environmental subsidy? It tried to be all three and achieved none convincingly. A currency needs to be a unit of account (nobody priced goods in SLR), a medium of exchange (nowhere accepted it), and a store of value (its price cratered 99%+).
Other proposals—NRGCoin, the Joule Standard, ATOMcoin—have fared no better. The pattern is consistent: interesting design, compelling theory, zero adoption.
The Deflationary Paradox: The Problem Nobody Has Solved
Here’s the core problem that haunts every energy-backed currency proposal, and it’s the one I flagged honestly in the Bootstrap Paradox article:
If a currency is pegged to 1 kWh per unit, and the cost of producing energy drops 90% (as solar has since 2010, from $0.417 to $0.043 per kWh), then each unit of currency buys ever-increasing amounts of real goods.
This is deflation. And deflation is economically destructive. It increases the real burden of debt. It discourages spending (why buy today when things will be cheaper tomorrow?). It rewards hoarding cash over investing it. The gold standard’s deflationary episodes caused enormous suffering—the “Crime of ‘73” (silver demonetization) and the Long Depression of 1873-1896 being the most notorious.
Now imagine the deflationary paradox on the Energy Standard’s timeline:
| Period | Solar LCOE | Fusion status | Energy Standard implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $0.043/kWh | Pilot plants | Tokens relatively stable |
| 2035 | ~$0.020/kWh | First commercial plants | Tokens appreciate ~50% |
| 2050 | ~$0.005/kWh | Widespread deployment | Tokens appreciate ~90% |
| 2070 | ~$0.001/kWh | Mature fusion grids | Tokens appreciate ~99% |
A currency that appreciates 99% over 45 years sounds wonderful if you’re holding it—and catastrophic if you have debts denominated in it. Every mortgage, every bond, every loan becomes exponentially harder to repay as energy gets cheaper.
This is the exact same problem that killed the gold standard. The commodity gets more abundant; the currency gets more valuable; debtors get crushed; the economy seizes.
The proposed solutions (and their limits)
The historical proposals each tackled the deflationary paradox differently:
Scott’s approach: expiring currency. Energy certificates expire at the end of each period. New certificates are issued based on the current energy budget. This eliminates both inflation and deflation by design—but also eliminates savings. You can’t accumulate wealth across periods. For a transitional currency bridging the old economy and the new, this is a non-starter. Richard Castellano isn’t converting $23 billion into tokens that expire in December.
Lietaer’s approach: demurrage fees. The Terra carries a 3.5-4% annual carrying cost that discourages hoarding and neutralizes deflationary tendencies. This is more sophisticated—it doesn’t eliminate savings but makes excessive hoarding expensive. The problem: a 4% demurrage rate doesn’t offset 90% deflation. If energy costs drop by half, you’d need a 50% demurrage rate—which is just confiscation by another name.
The basket approach: Backing currency with a diversified basket of commodities smooths out supply shocks in any single commodity. This helps with short-term volatility but doesn’t solve secular deflation. If the cost of everything drops because energy makes everything cheaper, the basket deflates along with its components.
The redenomination approach: Periodically redefine the peg—as FDR did in 1934, moving gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce. This works but requires a central authority willing to make politically difficult adjustments, and each redenomination undermines confidence in the currency’s stability.
I searched extensively for a formal academic model addressing the specific interaction of energy abundance with energy-backed currency deflation. I didn’t find one. The reasoning above is synthesized from historical commodity-money literature and the energy currency proposals themselves. This is a gap in the literature—and it’s the gap that matters most.
The Strongest Argument: Energy as the Universal Unit
Despite the deflationary paradox, the intellectual case for energy as the foundation of value is formidable. It’s not a fringe argument. It’s a suppressed mainstream argument—one that serious thinkers across multiple disciplines have arrived at independently.
Vaclav Smil, perhaps the world’s most respected energy analyst (Bill Gates has described waiting for new Smil books “the way he waited for Star Wars movies”), frames all of human progress in terms of joules of input versus joules of output. His Energy and Civilization: A History (MIT Press, 2017) treats energy as “the only universal currency”—necessary for getting anything done. Smil’s approach works because energy constraints are “the most impersonal and non-negotiable of all qualities.”
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971) demonstrated that the economic process is fundamentally entropic—all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when used. His The Entropy Law and the Economic Process is the founding text of ecological economics. Mainstream economics largely ignored it.
Howard T. Odum argued in the 1970s that all economic value traces back to energy per thermodynamic laws. His students—Robert Costanza, John Day, Charles Hall—built the field of biophysical economics and developed EROI (Energy Return on Investment) as a key metric.
Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr demonstrated that useful exergy (available energy that can do work) is a key driver of economic growth—a contribution not recognized by orthodox economics. Their framework challenges the standard Solow growth model by showing energy as a production factor on par with labor and capital.
The data supports them. There is a strong positive correlation between energy use per capita and GDP per capita across countries, especially at low-to-middle income levels. At low incomes, the relationship is nearly linear: more energy equals more GDP.
The academic field is called thermoeconomics (or bioeconomics, or biophysical economics). It applies the laws of statistical mechanics to economic theory. While still heterodox, it has produced a consistent finding across decades: energy is the master resource. Everything else is a derivative.
This doesn’t prove that energy-backed currency will work. But it establishes the theoretical foundation: if you’re looking for a physical invariant to anchor a monetary system, energy is the correct choice. A kilowatt-hour can always heat water, power a motor, run a computation. Its usefulness doesn’t change even as its cost changes.
The question is how to translate this theoretical superiority into a functioning monetary instrument.
What’s Different Now: Tokenized Real-World Assets
Here’s what Soddy, Scott, Ford, and Edison didn’t have: a functioning infrastructure for tokenizing physical assets.
The real-world asset (RWA) tokenization market hit an all-time high of $26.5 billion in 2025—a 70% increase since the start of the year. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, a tokenized U.S. Treasury product, surpassed $2.5 billion and is now used as collateral on Binance. Tokenized Treasuries overall surged 539% to reach $5.5 billion. BCG and Ripple project the tokenized asset market reaching $18.9 trillion by 2033.
Tokenized gold already works. Tether Gold (XAUT) is backed by over 375,000 troy ounces of LBMA-certified gold in Swiss vaults, with a market cap exceeding $2 billion. PAX Gold (PAXG) is issued under New York State financial regulation, with monthly independent audits. Together they hold over 90% of the tokenized gold market.
The infrastructure for creating, trading, and settling asset-backed tokens now exists at institutional scale. The question is no longer “can you tokenize a physical asset?” It’s “which physical asset should you tokenize?”
Gold’s weakness: it doesn’t do anything. Gold sits in vaults. Its value is primarily conventional—we agree it’s valuable because we’ve agreed it’s valuable for 5,000 years. This is fine for a store of value but philosophically unsatisfying for a currency meant to anchor the transition to abundance.
Energy’s strength: it does things. A kWh can always produce physical work. Its value isn’t conventional—it’s thermodynamic. But energy’s weakness—the deflationary paradox—remains unresolved.
The Energy Standard for the Unscarcity Framework: A Working Model
Given the historical record, here’s how the Energy Standard might actually work within the framework—with honest caveats about what remains speculative.
What the tokens represent
The critical distinction (flagged in the Bootstrap Paradox article) is between pegging tokens to energy output and pegging them to energy production capacity.
Output-pegged tokens (1 token = 1 kWh delivered) suffer the full deflationary paradox. As energy gets cheaper, each token buys more stuff. Hoarding is rewarded. Debtors suffer. This is the gold standard problem replayed.
Capacity-pegged tokens (1 token = a share in a physical power plant’s production capacity) behave differently. The token represents ownership of infrastructure—a fixed physical asset that produces energy regardless of its market price. The infrastructure doesn’t get cheaper because it already exists. It’s a productive asset, not a commodity unit.
Think of the distinction this way: owning a barrel of oil (commodity) is different from owning a share of an oil well (productive capacity). The barrel’s value fluctuates with the oil price. The well’s value reflects the discounted present value of all future oil it will produce. When oil prices fall, the barrel loses value immediately; the well loses value less because it still produces oil that does useful work.
The Free Zone’s Energy Standard would issue tokens against productive capacity: solar installations, fusion plants, battery storage. Each token represents a fractional claim on the energy output of real, operating infrastructure. The token pays “dividends” in energy—not dollars. You can use that energy directly (power your home, run your workshop) or trade it.
The demurrage mechanism (revised)
Lietaer’s insight about demurrage—a carrying cost that discourages hoarding—remains valuable, but the rate needs to track the energy cost trajectory rather than being fixed.
In the early years (2028-2035), when energy costs are still significant, demurrage is low (1-2%). As energy approaches abundance, demurrage increases to offset deflationary pressure. The rate is set algorithmically based on the observed cost trajectory—not by a central committee.
This isn’t perfect. It’s a managed peg, which means it requires governance. But it’s more robust than a fixed peg, and the governance is constrained by a formula rather than discretionary.
The adoption pathway
SolarCoin failed because it tried to be a global currency from day one. The Energy Standard doesn’t need global adoption. It needs to work within Free Zones.
A Free Zone with 50,000 residents and its own power infrastructure creates a closed economic loop where energy tokens have immediate utility:
- Residents receive a Foundation allocation of energy (free baseline)
- Surplus energy is tradeable via tokens
- Internal commerce—food, goods, services—is priced in energy tokens
- External trade (imports from the old economy) requires conversion to dollars or other fiat
The Free Zone is the adoption accelerator that SolarCoin never had. It’s not asking millions of strangers to accept a novel currency. It’s creating a self-contained economy where the currency has intrinsic utility because the energy it represents is the thing that powers everything in the community.
As Free Zones multiply and interconnect, the Energy Standard spreads through network effects rather than marketing campaigns. Zone-to-zone trade is denominated in energy tokens. The tokens gain liquidity as the network grows. Eventually—and this is the speculative part—the Energy Standard becomes credible enough that external actors (governments, corporations, individuals) accept it alongside fiat.
The Current Energy Economics: Why the Timing Matters
The Energy Standard’s viability depends on real energy costs. Here’s where things stand.
Solar has already won on cost
Global weighted-average solar LCOE (levelized cost of energy) stood at $0.043/kWh in 2024—a 90% decline from $0.417/kWh in 2010 (IRENA data). Regional lows hit $0.033/kWh in China. BloombergNEF projects fixed-axis solar reaching $0.035/kWh in 2025.
For comparison, Lazard’s 2025 LCOE+ report shows:
| Technology | LCOE Range ($/kWh) |
|---|---|
| Utility-scale solar | $0.038 - $0.217 |
| Onshore wind | $0.037 - $0.086 |
| Gas combined cycle | $0.048 - $0.109 |
| Coal | $0.071 - $0.173 |
| Nuclear (new build) | $0.141 - $0.220 |
Renewables are the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidized basis. Fossil fuel costs are roughly double utility-scale solar at the midpoint.
Fusion remains speculative but trending positive
All fusion cost estimates are speculative—no commercial plant exists. But for reference:
- First-of-a-kind plants: projected LCOE of $0.08-0.12/kWh
- Mature inertial confinement fusion: First Light Fusion claims potential LCOE as low as $0.025/kWh
- Leading startups target grid connection by 2035
- Over 160 fusion facilities are operational, under construction, or planned globally
Total global energy investment
The IEA estimates approximately $3.3 trillion per year in total global energy investment (2025). The ratio of clean power to fossil fuel power investment went from 2:1 in 2015 to 10:1 in 2024. Solar PV investment alone exceeds $500 billion annually, surpassing all other generation sources combined.
What this means for the Energy Standard: The physical infrastructure that would back energy tokens is being built anyway—by private investors responding to the same cost curves that make the transition inevitable. The Energy Standard doesn’t require building energy infrastructure from scratch. It requires tokenizing infrastructure that the market is already building.
The GDP-Energy Correlation: The Empirical Foundation
The strongest empirical case for energy as the foundation of value comes from macroeconomic data.
Our World in Data shows a strong positive correlation between energy use per capita and GDP per capita across countries. At low-to-middle income levels, the relationship is nearly linear. More energy equals more economic output.
The decoupling debate—whether rich countries can grow GDP while reducing energy use—is more nuanced than headlines suggest. Many OECD countries show relative decoupling (GDP growing faster than energy use). But a 2019 European Environmental Bureau report, Decoupling Debunked, found that absolute decoupling of primary energy from GDP “lacks empirical support” at the global level. Much apparent decoupling reflects offshoring energy-intensive production—importing Chinese steel instead of making your own doesn’t reduce global energy use; it moves it.
Jevons’ Paradox remains stubbornly relevant: increased energy efficiency often leads to increased total energy use through rebound effects. When driving becomes cheaper per mile, people drive more miles.
The implication: in an economy approaching post-scarcity, energy doesn’t become less important. It becomes the only thing that matters. When labor is automated and materials are recycled by robots, the binding constraint on all production is the energy input. This is exactly the condition that makes an energy-denominated currency theoretically optimal.
Honest Assessment: What We Know and What We Don’t
Let me be direct about the confidence levels.
What we know (high confidence):
- Energy is the physical foundation of all economic value (thermoeconomics, Smil, Georgescu-Roegen)
- The cost of energy is falling rapidly and will continue to fall (solar data, fusion trajectory)
- Fiat currencies face a structural challenge as labor tax bases erode (labor cliff data)
- Tokenized real-world assets are a proven technology at $26.5B+ scale (BlackRock BUIDL, etc.)
- Previous energy-backed currencies failed due to adoption barriers, not theoretical flaws
What we think (moderate confidence):
- Capacity-pegged tokens behave differently from commodity-pegged ones (analogous reasoning from equity markets, but untested for energy)
- A closed-loop Free Zone economy can bootstrap adoption that SolarCoin couldn’t (plausible but unproven)
- Managed demurrage can offset deflationary pressure (Lietaer’s design is sound; the scaling question is open)
What we’re guessing (low confidence):
- The Energy Standard can scale from Free Zone use to broader adoption (network effects are unpredictable)
- The deflationary paradox can be managed without periodic redenomination (no formal model exists)
- External actors will accept energy tokens for trade (requires credibility that doesn’t yet exist)
The Energy Standard is the framework’s most speculative mechanism. It’s also the most necessary—because without an alternative to fiat, the Transition Trusts are holding depreciating currency. The four-mechanism solution requires all four locks to have keys. This key is the least proven.
The honest position: the theoretical case is strong. The implementation pathway is plausible. The historical precedents are cautionary. And the formal economics of energy-backed deflation management remain underdeveloped.
This is our best answer. It’s not a settled one.
What Needs to Happen Next
For the Energy Standard to move from concept to functioning monetary instrument:
1. Build the formal model. The deflationary paradox needs a rigorous mathematical treatment—not analogies to the gold standard, but a formal model of energy-backed currency behavior under conditions of secular energy cost decline. This is a paper waiting to be written.
2. Pilot within the first Free Zone. The Energy Standard doesn’t need to work globally on day one. It needs to work within a single community of 5,000-50,000 people who use energy tokens for internal commerce. The data from this pilot informs everything else.
3. Establish institutional-grade verification. Real-time, auditable energy production data from Free Zone infrastructure, verified by independent parties. This is the foundation of token credibility.
4. Develop the demurrage algorithm. The managed demurrage rate needs to be tested against real production cost trajectories, not theoretical curves. This requires operational data that doesn’t exist yet.
5. Create the conversion mechanism. A functioning exchange between energy tokens and fiat currencies, with transparent pricing and sufficient liquidity. This is the bridge between the old monetary system and the new one.
None of this is easy. But then, the gold standard wasn’t easy either. It took centuries to develop, decades to formalize, and 27 years of Bretton Woods to reach its most sophisticated form. The Energy Standard is at the equivalent of the 1870s—the theoretical foundations are laid, the early proposals exist, and the hard engineering work of implementation remains.
The difference: we may not have centuries. The Bootstrap Paradox identified a window of roughly 2028-2038 where scarcity-era wealth can still fund the transition. The Energy Standard needs to be functional within that window—not globally, but within the Free Zone ecosystem.
The ice cube doesn’t wait for perfect monetary theory.
Further Reading
- The Bootstrap Paradox — Why we need an alternative to fiat in the first place
- Transition Trusts — Where Energy Standard tokens would be held
- The EXIT Protocol — The deal that converts elite wealth into energy credits
- Free Zone Economics — The $8,000/person math
- Timeline Sensitivity — What if fusion takes longer than expected?
- The Potential Timeline — When abundance technologies might arrive
- The Land Tax That Funds Abundance — Mechanism 2: revenue without income tax
References
- Gold Standard Act - Wikipedia — U.S. gold peg of $20.67/oz
- Bretton Woods System - Federal Reserve History — 1944 international monetary architecture
- Nixon Shock - Federal Reserve History — August 15, 1971
- Frederick Soddy - Wikipedia — Nobel laureate, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt (1926)
- Technocracy Movement - Wikipedia — Howard Scott’s Energy Certificates
- Ford and Edison, the Anti Gold Bugs — 1921 Muscle Shoals proposal
- Buckminster Fuller on the Global Energy Grid - GENI — Metabolic currency concept
- Terra (Proposed Currency) - Wikipedia — Lietaer’s commodity-basket design with demurrage
- SolarCoin - CoinMarketCap — Current market data
- IRENA: Solar LCOE falls 90% since 2010 - PV Tech — Cost trajectory data
- Lazard LCOE+ 2025 — Cross-technology cost comparison
- World Energy Investment 2025 - IEA — $3.3T annual investment
- Energy and Civilization - MIT Press — Vaclav Smil’s definitive work
- Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen - Wikipedia — Entropy and economics
- Thermoeconomics - Wikipedia — The academic field
- Energy Use per Person vs. GDP per Capita - Our World in Data — Empirical correlation
- Decoupling Debunked - EEB — 2019 report on decoupling claims
- RWA Tokenization Trends 2025 - Brickken — $26.5B market
- BlackRock BUIDL Fund - CoinDesk — Tokenized Treasury fund
- Gold, Silver, and Monetary Stability - IMF — Commodity currency deflationary episodes
- The Gold Standard, Deflation, and Financial Crisis - NBER — Historical deflation analysis
- Defusing the Energy Trap - Frontiers in Energy Research — Energy currency academic survey
- Exergy Theory of Value - SSRN — Goldman (2023) unification attempt
- Unscarcity, Chapter 8: The Transition — Full narrative context
A kilowatt-hour can heat a room, power a factory, run a computation. It does useful work regardless of what the Federal Reserve decides, what Congress debates, or what markets price. This thermodynamic reliability is either the foundation of a new monetary system—or an interesting footnote in the history of ideas that came too late. The difference depends entirely on whether someone builds the system while the old one is still running.
