What is the Energy Transition trying to optimise for?

Health economists often optimise for QALYs, Quality Adjusted Life Years. The QALY is commonly used in economic evaluations as a means of quantifying the health effect of a medical intervention or a prevention program?and ultimately to help payers allocate healthcare resources.

While such a tool or indicator is far from perfect, it would be interesting to know the equivalent for energy economics. An indicator that tries to incorporate both the quantity and quality of the energy transition.

Not only economists, like market designers, but also technologists, like algorithm designers would potentially benefit from having a more unified indicator that can they optimise for.

While discussing the matter with Neil Yorke-Smith for an academic workshop he offered the following hypothetical (I'm paraphrasing):

What if the energy system would optimise for prosumers giving their surplus energy to a neighbour in need, instead of keeping their Tesla fully charged just in case they want to take it for a spin?

Analogue to the health domain: what if people would not donate their blood for free?

Although this is a very specific use case, it already raises interesting questions for market designers and algorithm designers alike. Too many questions to deal with right now.

But not to worry, I'm exploring new PhD research in the area of evidenced based policy making for algorithm & market design and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

P.s. I'm also interested to join research consortia that want to include these kind of topics.