CLPFUDatabase: A suite of R packages for energy conversion chain analysis

Energy flowing through societal energy conversion chains (ECCs) enables economic activity and facilitates human flourishing. To understand economic growth and human well-being, the field of societal energy analysis (Common, 1976) evaluates ECCs from the primary stage (resources extracted from the environment, such as coal, oil, natural gas, wind, and solar), to the final stage (energy purchased by consumers, such as refined petroleum and electricity), to the useful stage (energy desired by the end user, such as heat, motion, and light), and sometimes to energy services (such as thermal comfort, transport, and illumination). Societal exergy analysis (SEA) (Ertesvåg, 2001), an extension of societal energy analysis, quantifies ECCs in exergy terms. We created a suite of open-source R packages and the metapackage CLPFUDatabase (Heun, 2023a) to assist SEA practitioners to analyze ECCs. The new packages enable analysis of any country in the world across timespans of decades or longer. In short, the new packages enable, for the first time, scalable SEA. We used the new packages to create the CL-PFU database, a new resource for the SEA community (Brockway et al., 2024). This paper describes the design of the new packages and demonstrates briefly their use.