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This article's AFD debate did not get consensus. Johnleemk | Talk 11:34, 8 December 2005 (UTC)Reply
In the 1930's, S.Glasstone associated qualitative phenomena with electrochemistry. In particular Glasstone consdiered the electrochemical process of hydrolysis - in which a molecule is broken down by water - a qualitative phenomenon. But at the time of his writing Glasstone noted that "experimental methods [were] not sufficiently exact for the quantitative determinations.." (1937, p. 208). In this sense Glasstone was concerned to account for the qualitative aspects of direct energy transformations of electrochemical reactions with a quantitative scientific measuring instrument. It is noteworthy that Glasstone's text was first published in 1930, six years prior to the first year of production of National Technical Laboratories' 444 Model G Beckman Hydrogen potential (pH) meter. The commercial creation of this meter apparently began with a request from the citrus industry for an instrument that could accurately assess the acidity of soil. This request came about because it was known that the ripeness, and quality of citrus fruit are highly sensitive to soil and water acidity, and the industry sought an instrumental method for quality standardisation. The acidity or alkalinity of various compounds like soil, may be interpreted in terms of complete dissociation to free ions with possible hydrolysis of the dissolved ions. The pH meter was therefore involved in the quantitative measure of what S.Glasstone had considered a qualitative phenomenon. Subsequent developments were concerned to greater specify the roles of different energy forms of energy in the qualitative aspects of direct energy transformations, but also indirect energy transformations involved in making a product or service.
Energy monism Is there only one system of reference for energy quality as employed in Systems Ecology? Put another way we might ask, is there one most useful system of reference? This is tantamount to asking about our commitment to the philosophy of monism. H.T.Odum appeared to believe that one system was a more useful system of reference than any other in the geobiosphere, and that was the mechanism of photosynthesis - the lungs of the planet. In this way H.T.Odum gave the mechanism of photosynthesis a central location in the quantitative definition of energy quality, whereby the solar joule takes the position of unity in the emergy accounting scheme. H.T.Odum related other energy qualities back to the solar joule thereby finding the energy quality factor of any particular form of energy.
Not sure if the above is crackpot. Sholto Maud 23:46, 18 December 2005 (UTC)Reply
After eyeballing a few papers from online, it seems that exergy is 100% non-protoscience and I think I even remember being taught something like it a few years back in advanced undergrad or intro grad ChemE. The concept is over 100 years old, so I'm adding rigor to the exergy page now and removing some of the oddness. The next step will be emergy and then this page. In the meantime, I suggest renaming this thing transformity because "quality" is an ambiguous pseudosciency term that just assumes everyone is speaking about ecocentric quality when they say quality, and that's an NPOV thing to assume. There's plenty of people out there who would chop down 200 acres of virgin rainforest for 50 cents worth of 12 carat gold and call it a quality energy improvement. But you can bet they won't call it a tragic decrease in emergy. Or increase in transforminininity. Or whatever. I'm not that far yet. A side-benefit is I'm starting to actually enjoy ChemE again. Anyway, I'm proposing moving this article to transformity and redirecting energy quality to transformity...and doing a major rewrite to remove the oddness and give a clear-cut plan to the internet world to save us all from the impending doom of the deemergence. I think I'll be able to understand this stuff and wrastle with it until it makes enough sense for a lot of other people to make money off it. What do you think, Sholto? Will I get a cut? Flying Jazz 17:31, 28 December 2005 (UTC)Reply
Asearch for "energy quality" + "qualia" on Google returns only six results, of which one is the Wikipedia article and three others which are mirrors. The remaining two results seem unrelated to the usage in this article. As best I can determine, the term "qualia" has never before been used in relation to energy quality, prior to being used in this article in that way. A quick look at qualia shows that the topic of that article is also unrelated to this usage. As such, I am de-linking those terms but am leaving the words themselves in place. If you really think that the term is not only appropriate but also is so relevant that it needs to be wikilinked, please provide references to support this usage. --Sapphic 20:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)Reply
"an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us".
Sholto Maud 04:48, 16 April 2007 (UTC)Reply
I added the NPOV tag because significant criticisms of the concept of energy quality and the entire field that produced it are not reported in the article. See Talk:Emergy#Neutrality. Flying Jazz (talk) 17:18, 17 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
I find it remarkable that as of the beginning of 2.1.'08, the first use of the word entropy occurs in the reference section. It would seem that thermodynamics has little or no relevance to the concept of energy quality. This is astonishing. Comments from others on this extreme oddity? ww (talk) 20:43, 2 January 2008 (UTC)Reply
I expected to find only physics and engineering content in this article (e.g. references to Carnot machines, theoretical and practical numbers for energy conversion efficiency, relation to the second law of thermodynamics, etc.). That is, limited to energy in the physics sense.
Not ecological systems, postmodernism, spirituality, and astrology.
I also find the following statement dubious:
I don't think this is the normal meaning of potential energy and kinetic energy (macroscopic) - even if individual elementary particles have kinetic energy, etc.
--Mortense (talk) 13:32, 26 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
It seems that there is some discussion of deletion for this page. I voted for KEEP, but even so, it might need some fixing. As well as I know, energy quality is most often discussed in the case of conservation of energy and heat engines, where heat is a lower quality energy form. It would be interesting to mention Combined cycle power plant where, in the usual case, two heat engines are used to extract more energy from a heat source. Gah4 (talk) 01:11, 16 November 2020 (UTC)Reply