The words we use

Words that keep coming back in this manual, and what they mean exactly. Anyone who wants to check the sums or argue with them needs to know what is written; vague terms make a discussion impossible to settle.

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Words from physics

Energy

The ability to make something happen: to heat a room, move a load, keep a motor turning. Measured in joules or kilowatt-hours. Energy cannot appear out of nothing and cannot disappear; it only changes form.

Electricity

Charge moving through a wire. Of all the forms energy comes in, this is the handiest: you turn it into motion, light or heat with very little lost along the way.

Exergy

The part of the energy you can still do something with. Lukewarm bath water holds a lot of energy, but it will not set anything in motion; the energy is still there, it has simply become useless. Every conversion costs some of that usefulness. Only the usable part counts towards the reserve, so nobody can pump up the meter with heat that does no work.

Capacity

How much fits in at most, whether that is a battery or a lake behind a dam. The bank does not own that room, it rents it: from provinces and from people at home.

Power

How fast it goes, in watts. Capacity is how big the bucket is; power is how wide the tap. It decides how quickly the reserve fills up or runs dry, not how much fits in it.

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Words from the money system

Central Energy Reserve

All the usable electricity that is stored somewhere at this moment and falls under the bank. Not in one place: spread across industrial storage, provincial stations and batteries in people's sheds and garages.

Energy Claim

The coin itself: a signed credit that entitles you to a proportional share of the reserve, at the current backing ratio and minus what the transport costs. At full backing that is exactly one kilowatt-hour. Not a bank's promise, but a claim on something that is lying there waiting.

Backing (Backing Ratio)

How much reserve there is behind each coin: the physical exergy reserve (in kWh) divided by all the energy claims in circulation. A backing ratio of 1.000 (1:1) means every coin is covered by real energy, one for one: the formal status fully backed. Below 1.000 and part of the money is a promise again: formally under-backed, colloquially the fiat status.

Monetary Trust

The odds that the bank can actually deliver what it guaranteed, worked out from historical data and live measurements. Elsewhere trust rests on habit and belief. Here you can look it up: the backing ratio stands in the public ledger, and anyone can read it.

Delivery Queue

All the electricity already redeemed but not yet physically delivered, in kilowatt-hours, deducted from the reserve before the backing ratio is computed; only the total is public, rounded and on a fixed cadence, never an order and never anybody's position in it.

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Words for people and protection

Manual Admission

The route in which a human being establishes that you are one person, with no token and with nobody from your neighbourhood vouching for you, so that saying no to the identity layer does not cost you your subsistence floor.

Institutional Attestation

A single statement by a body bound by professional confidentiality (a GP, a shelter, a social work team, a housing corporation, a municipality) that replaces the whole round of neighbourhood attestations, with only its validity and its expiry recorded and never who issued it.

Safety Flag

The marker set by you or by an accredited safeguarding body when disclosure of your location would put you in danger, and liftable by the two of you alone, never by the instance.

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Words for what happens daily

Issuance (Minting)

New energy claims coming into circulation. This happens on one condition only: net usable exergy has to go into the reserve first, for example electricity from renewable sources flowing into a connected storage station. No charge in, no coin out.

Withdrawal (Redemption / Burning)

Energy claims going out of circulation. A holder hands in claims to pull physical electricity out of the network and use it. The moment that electricity leaves the reserve, the matching claims are destroyed for good: burned. The power is gone, and so is the coin.

Verification (Audit)

Continuously checking what the meters at the connected storage stations say against what the ledger says is there. The two have to match. Independent software agents and certified gatekeepers do that checking, around the clock.