Interesting analysis Jan, thanks for posting. On the data, I notice the units used are TWh. I guess the graph to be in terms of TWh per year, otherwise if it was total TWh, there would be no decline, just a less steep rate of accumulation, if the power demand had declined, unless we reset the count to zero each year. To make the data less confusing, I would be inclined to convert it to Watts, which would relate directly to grid power, so we would get a clearer view of how much less generation resources are being put to use, and maybe the reasons why.
So the peak figure of 88.5TWh would be divided by the number of hours in a year to give the net generation capcity in Watts that year, ie 88.5x10^12 / 8760 = 10.102x10^9 approx, so around 10.1 GW.
Sounds a little low to me. But using the data anyway, if it dropped 22% then we took out about 2GW generation capacity from 2005 to 2021.
To me there is one obvious possible reason for the generation capicity reduction; we probably installed at least that much domestic solar capacity in that time, which would have reduced the power consumption data on the grid, which is where I guess your data was collected from.
This confirms what I've been saying about the effect of solar on the economy, it makes perfect logical sense.
The energy still used by solar equipped consumers no longer features in the economy, it is as if they stopped existing, because they are getting their energy from a source which is not included in the financial economy, yet those folk are still spending the money they saved in electric bills in the economy.
But we don't issue money on it. So whilst solar continues to necessarily scale up, so also money is becoming increasingly less representative of actual valuable product generating real additive value to the economy.
See the issue?
Your data confirms it, it seems to me.
The only way money can be issued on it, is for money to be issued for free, representing a number of Joules per token, because there is no per-joule labor of extraction associated, it can't be represented by money-as-debt, because that can only translate to promises to pay, which are in the end promises to extract, when all else is theoretically automated.
Since no money has been issued on that unmonetised solar product received, it is useful to return to TWh again, but this time to add up the values each year, to guage the total TWh due to solar over the years, to estimate how much latent solar product is "In the bank", available for money to be issued on.
We can get a quick estimate for the six years since 2015 using your data, by considering that the change over the six year period from 2015 to 2021 is around 2GW. If we said worst case there was no solar energy existing in 2015, and 2GW capacity existing in 2021, then the average amount of solar capacity put to use in that period was 1GW. So the TWh "in the bank" can be computed roughly as 1GW for 6 years, ie 6 x 8760 x 10^9 = 52.6 TWh.
That is quite a lot of money waiting to be issued, it seems to me, and this is a very worst case calculation on data which looks short.
As said, I think your data is a little down - I am sure the UK energy grid capacity is much more than the 10 odd GW we calculated above, and we know from other data that there is about 10GW solar in any case, which probably was implemented over the past twenty years, rather than just six, but hopefully you see the way to calculate Kardashev money now, given good data :)
Btw, knowing the kind of lamps normally in offices, at least in UK, they are most often still fluorescent tubes, not many are LED lit like we use at home, but your calculations are probablly easily scaled, by using the difference in energy efficiencies between LED lighting and flourescent.
