1 Kookaburra = 1 Megawatt Hour

A while back I was thinking we needed a good solid baseline of value, and I facetiously proposed calling this new, artificial unit of money the Kookaburra. After all, it was a kookie idea, it was totally opposite from the way things are done now, and Australia is on the opposite side of the Earth. I was thinking we could take a bunch of prices, stir them into a pot, and come up with a number. There are a number of problems with this kind of arrangement:

• who decides what goes in the pot,
• what kind of stirring technique is use, and
• someone has to be constantly stirring the pot,

all of which would make any number delivered by such a process suspect, to say the least.

This morning I had a flash of insight: the price of electricity! Our modern way of life is built on electricity, we use it for everything, and it takes all the skills of our civilization to produce it. We need fuel to power the generating plants, we need engineering and construction to build the plants and deliver the power, and we need financing to enable it to be done. It's a big part of who we are.

The only question I had was how much electricity should one Kookaburra be worth? One kilowatt-hour, the common measure of residential power consumption, is only about a dime. The next most common measure is the megawatt-hour, which is a thousand times bigger, which would make one Kookaburra worth about $100. Now that is a nice round number. Since the dollar in only worth about 10% of what it was 50 years ago, that would make a Kookaburra worth about $10 in 1960, also a nice round number.

I wanted to produce a graph showing the value of dollar relative to the Kookaburra, but that would take some time, and I wanted to get this posted before my apathy took hold and I forgot about it. I did a little looking, and I found this PDF, which has some very interesting graphs (starting on page 21) of energy use over the last 50 years or so. I found it on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s web page, which has links to a bunch more web pages.

P.S. The PDF is laid out in landscape format, which means it fits on the screen nicely. Is this the wave of the future? Should I shelve the idea of getting a portrait monitor? Well, it's already been effectively shelved it, I don't have $400 to spend on frivolity.