It is clear to me that we need a currency that exists independent of the current fossil credit banking system. I wrote about the tree currency system the EU needs to rid itself of fossil banking occupation (Euro, Auro, Joule revisited). The reason is that as long as we use Euro, Dollars or Yens to trade renewable energy we are in the same monetary space as fossil fuels. Because fossil fuel production is costless the price of fossil fuels is arbitrary, and thus it is impossible for renewables to develop a true relationship with the price of products.
Fossil fuels do not have a monetary cost to produce. The production proces can be facilitated by delivering or promising fossil fuels
Just to illustrate, a piece of electronics from China can cost 2 Euro by airfreight, no shipping cost. This is because as long as banks print money oil companies will deliver the oil, kerosine, plastic, gas to whomever holds the cash. The cost of a 2 Euro products is in reality way higher, but the waste of fossil fuels in the process of producing and shipping it to me remains hidden. The fact remains : Nobody can make fossil fuels, they are a gift!
We need a new currency to develop a new economy around renewable energy, the ‘Roboeconomy’
To enable a separate powerbase to develop we need to introduce a new currency to trade renewable energy. We find the name Joule highly appropriate for such currency. This is because the Joule value of energy is ultimately what we need to do work. A KiloWattHour or kWh is an amount of Joules, its 1000 Joule per second times (60 x 60) seconds = 3600000 Joules or 3.6 MegaJoules.
A Joule can not be traded for Euros
Every currency needs rules. This is a big mistake in the crypto sphere. Bitcoin has no rules, the only reason Bitcoin works is because the amount is limited, because energy companies like the mining revenue, because it has a true administrative utility (at what cost though? Ripple is cheaper) and inertia. The Joule currency will not be a detached crypto coin, it will be a specifically allocated trading token for renewable energy.
A joule is not a free floating crypto coin. It has rules, and it can be implemented in many ways.
Money is always an energy credit
The basic idea of the Joule is that you want to be able to sell your energy, as an owner of a solar farm, wind farm, wave energy farm etc. To do this people can buy Joules from the owner of the energy source. Those Joules can be used to pay for the energy but also to buy goods from people who will accept the Joule coin. Anything made with electricity can be bought with the Joule, even though the actual value of an individual Joule varies greatly. There has to be an algorithm to compute the actual energy value of Joules, especially in the beginning.
We forget sometimes our money has wildly varying value based on our location. Gasoline prices show that : A mile of driving can differ in price by 40% in Europe, or conversely, the local value of the Euro can do the same!
Storage
Storage of electricity will greatly facilitate the usefullness and liquidity of Joules. One can imagine a wind turbin owner delivering energy to a central battery where people can buy the electricity (or rather pay for it) in Joules that all have a similar value. Ideally a network of energy stores develops so that the Joule is more or less equal value anywhere, even if it is not available everywhere.
Taxation
The government plays a large role in the creation of Joules. It is possible to imagine an automatic process to allocate them, but it is more likely the tax office will do it. The reason is that the government taxes productivity in the land (with the claimed goal to share this wealth to reduce social tensions). With the Joule it will be very easy to do this. The producer of renewable energy is entitled to Joules, but the tax office takes a portion of them as tax. So let’s say a person generates 5000 kWh a year, that becomes 18000 MJ (mega Joule, which can be simplified to Joule), so 18000 J. Of this the government takes 10% (but the number is decided in politics and with regards of the social needs) and the owner gets to loan out the remaining 16200 J, maybe add it to a Joule bank. The value of the taxated Jouls varies from place to place, but so do the needs of people.
Lifecycle of the Joule
A Joule exists only so lang as it has not been used to buy energy. So the producer of energy gets Joules, and can borrow them or spend them against products and services. It makes no sense for the producer to buy energy with the Joules, because he/she has energy to sell.
Anyone accepting Joule can buy energy or products sold for Joule. This can be any product, its up to the seller. Whoever makes products needs energy to do that, so say the pizza restaurant sells pizza’s for Joules and uses those Joules to buy the eletricity for the oven, refigiration, lighting, heating etc. These Joule return to the energy producers, and there they evaporate.
Our current money system tries its best to hide a very similar lifecycle but for fossil fuels. The energy companies claim to make profit and have cost etc. In reality oil companies have no use for the profits they make. The reason is that if they spend the profits, this will cause more oil consumption. All the money keeps returning to them! Iran tried to sell oil for gold, but this stopped because all the gold in the world would end up in Iran!
Structure of the Roboeconomy
A renewables based economy (so called roboeconomy) is thus a patchwork of energy producers, Joule currency circulating and wealth being produced. Regions with no producers can recieve shipments of stored energy, this can be mobile batteries or methan or hydrogen or ammonia or ethanol produced elsewhere.
Many people will however have their own energy sources, so the demand for Joules may be low in affluent places. Life will be cheap there. Right now we see that life is cheap in places where nature absorbs a lot of sunlight in a way humans can use. We will see renewables join nature in creating an evironment that supports human life and requires almost no effort (especially when we use technology and AI to assist us).
Joule banks
As described above anyone with renewable resources can become a Joule bank. They are opposed to the existing Euro, Dollar etc. banks. The Joule can not be created out of thin air like the other currencies. No instruments can be based on them. Administration of the Joule should be done by the state, the tax office preferably. It should form a separate ecosystem from the banking system so that it can form a separete power base, which is the purpose of the currency. It should be possible to have Joules and Euro’s and Auros (see my other piece on the gold currency) in some app.
It makes no sense though to convert Joules to Euro as Euro’s can be printed at will, while Joules can not. When the Joule comes into existence the Euro and other currencies become limited for fossil energy and can no longer be used to purchase renewable energy by law.
Development of the Joule Currency
Right now energy trade is strictly regulated in most places where fossil credit banks are in power. You may not notice but ‘economics’ and ‘is good for the economy’ are from the fossil credit lexicon. They are almost never good for renewables or being climate responsible. Banks put producers of wind farms into serious debt, so that their currency, the Euro or Dollar, is used to trade the energy. The losses due to transportation are hidden, the cost of delivery of methane (gas) can be enormous, simply because it requires a permanent medium to travel through (gas bottles are way cheaper).
To develop the Joule currency energy trade must become free. It can be taxed by VAT (although I don’t know if that makes any sense). A practical way in which energy trade is free is through the use of mobile batteries. Most storage methods are lossy. hydrogen wastes up to 70%, so not desirable. As batteries proliferate and become cheaper we can see them used to move electricity around.