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Entropy and the Economy
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Entropy and the Economy

A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 January 2016) | Viewed by 20967

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Reiner Kümmel

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute for Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, D-97074 Würzburg, Germany
Interests: superconductivity, semiconductors; energy-, emission-, and cost optimization, energy, entropy, and economic growth
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleague,

Mainstream economic theory deals essentially with the behavior of economic actors on markets. The productive physical basis of industrial economies, where energy conversion and entropy production determine the production of goods and services, is of little, if any, concern. Thus, the first and the second law of thermodynamics, which have guided the economic evolution of industrial countries since the Industrial Revolution, hardly play any role in standard economics. (Georgescu-Roegen, though, a renowned economist, had emphasized the importance of the entropy law for the economic process. However, his claim to have discovered a fourth law of thermodynamics had created some confusion). Given the fact that entropy production is inevitably coupled to energy conversion and that energy conversion is essential for industrial production and economic growth, the Special Issue "Entropy and the Economy" invites heterodox economists, engineers, and natural scientists to submit papers on topics like the ones on the following non-exclusive list: How entropy production destroys exergy; the measurement of energy quantity (enthalpy) and quality (exergy/enthalpy) from fossil fuels, nuclear fission and fusion, and renewables; exergy requirements for refining raw materials and exploiting energy resources; entropy production and the emissions of particles and heat in industrial processes; life-cycle analysis of specific emissions from energy-converting facilities; emissions, human health, and the stability of the environment, economic losses from climate change; entropy production, technical progress, and limits to growth; mitigating entropy production by technical and social constraints; energy and economic growth: beyond the limits of Earth?

Prof. Dr. Reiner Kümmel
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • entropy production
  • exergy
  • energy conversion
  • emissions
  • industrial production
  • economic growth
  • constraints

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

2714 KiB  
Article
Exergy and Thermoeconomic Analysis for an Underground Train Station Air-Conditioning Cooling System
by Ke Yang Liao and Yew Khoy Chuah
Entropy 2016, 18(3), 86; https://doi.org/10.3390/e18030086 - 7 Mar 2016
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 7641
Abstract
The necessity of air-conditioning causes the enormous energy use of underground train stations. Exergy and thermoeconomic analysis is applied to the annual operation of the air-conditioning system of a large underground train station in Taiwan. The current installation and the monitored data are [...] Read more.
The necessity of air-conditioning causes the enormous energy use of underground train stations. Exergy and thermoeconomic analysis is applied to the annual operation of the air-conditioning system of a large underground train station in Taiwan. The current installation and the monitored data are taken to be the base case, which is then compared to three different optimized designs. The total revenue requirement levelized cost rate and the total exergy destruction rate are used to evaluate the merits. The results show that the cost optimization objective would obtain a lower total revenue requirement levelized cost rate, but at the expense of a higher total exergy destruction rate. Optimization of thermodynamic efficiency, however, leads to a lower total exergy destruction rate, but would increase the total revenue requirement levelized cost rate significantly. It has been shown that multi-objective optimization would result in a small marginal increase in total revenue requirement levelized cost rate, but achieve a significantly lower total exergy destruction rate. Results in terms of the normalized total revenue requirement levelized cost rate and the normalized total exergy destruction rate are also presented. It has been shown by second law analysis when applied to underground train stations that lower annual energy use and lower CO2 emissions can be achieved. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Entropy and the Economy)
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457 KiB  
Article
The Impact of Entropy Production and Emission Mitigation on Economic Growth
by Reiner Kümmel
Entropy 2016, 18(3), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/e18030075 - 27 Feb 2016
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 6377
Abstract
Entropy production in industrial economies involves heat currents, driven by gradients of temperature, and particle currents, driven by specific external forces and gradients of temperature and chemical potentials. Pollution functions are constructed for the associated emissions. They reduce the output elasticities of the [...] Read more.
Entropy production in industrial economies involves heat currents, driven by gradients of temperature, and particle currents, driven by specific external forces and gradients of temperature and chemical potentials. Pollution functions are constructed for the associated emissions. They reduce the output elasticities of the production factors capital, labor, and energy in the growth equation of the capital-labor-energy-creativity model, when the emissions approach their critical limits. These are drawn by, e.g., health hazards or threats to ecological and climate stability. By definition, the limits oblige the economic actors to dedicate shares of the available production factors to emission mitigation, or to adjustments to the emission-induced changes in the biosphere. Since these shares are missing for the production of the quantity of goods and services that would be available to consumers and investors without emission mitigation, the “conventional” output of the economy shrinks. The resulting losses of conventional output are estimated for two classes of scenarios: (1) energy conservation; and (2) nuclear exit and subsidies to photovoltaics. The data of the scenarios refer to Germany in the 1980s and after 11 March 2011. For the energy-conservation scenarios, a method of computing the reduction of output elasticities by emission abatement is proposed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Entropy and the Economy)
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228 KiB  
Article
Constitutive Explanations as a Methodological Framework for Integrating Thermodynamics and Economics
by Carsten Herrmann-Pillath
Entropy 2016, 18(1), 18; https://doi.org/10.3390/e18010018 - 31 Dec 2015
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4991
Abstract
The common approach to integrating thermodynamics and economics is subsuming thermodynamic aspects among the set of constraints under which economic activity takes place. The causal link between energy and growth is investigated via aggregate econometric analysis. This paper discusses methodological issues of aggregate [...] Read more.
The common approach to integrating thermodynamics and economics is subsuming thermodynamic aspects among the set of constraints under which economic activity takes place. The causal link between energy and growth is investigated via aggregate econometric analysis. This paper discusses methodological issues of aggregate analysis and proposes an alternative framework based on recent developments in philosophy of science, in particular of the life sciences. “Constitutive explanations” eschew the covering law approach to scientific explanation and concentrate on the identification of multi-level architectures of causal mechanisms that generate phenomena. This methodology has been productively employed to organize cross-disciplinary research, and I suggest that it can also provide a framework for integrating thermodynamics and economics, since this also requires the combination of several scientific disciplines. I present the example of the “rebound effect” as a kind of constitutive explanation and put it in the context of urbanization as a complex mechanism that is the defining feature of economic growth in physical terms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Entropy and the Economy)
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