SELRA: A Research Agenda for Reducing Lifecycle Capital-Allocation Losses in Energy-Resource Efficiency Projects
Selection, Economic-Lifecycle Realization, and Capital-Allocation Quality in Industrial Energy Projects
Working paper, v1.0
Submitted to SSRN; public record pending.
Industrial projects aimed at improving the economic efficiency of energy-resource use often underperform in ways that familiar evaluation tools do not fully explain. This paper introduces SELRA - the Selection and Economic-Lifecycle Realization Architecture - as the backbone of a research agenda for reducing lifecycle capital-allocation losses in such projects. The central claim is that weak outcomes arise not only from bad equipment, insufficient financing, or incorrect use of standard metrics. They also arise when the economic object is constructed too narrowly at the selection stage and when the selected project is not preserved through structuring, implementation, verification, and post-guarantee life. SELRA distinguishes two analytically separate but economically interdependent layers: selection of the right project and economic-lifecycle realization of the selected project. It ties both to capital-allocation quality at broader scales. Standard tools such as net present value, lifecycle costing, techno-economic analysis, and measurement-and-verification remain necessary, but their practical reliability depends on a prior architecture that defines what is being compared, how alternatives become admissible, and how selected value is carried into realized effect. The framework is presented as the codification and formalization phase of a longer trajectory combining earlier methodological work in economics with sustained applied engagement in industrial lighting, distributed generation, and related energy-resource domains. The paper is not a completed proof or a new valuation formula. Its contribution is architecture, demarcation, and agenda formation: it positions the program against its nearest neighbors in the project-definition and benefits-realization traditions and makes it legible, so that later papers can carry their specific burdens without being forced into a single overloaded manuscript.
Architecture, demarcation, and agenda formation
- Defines SELRA as a research architecture for selection and economic-lifecycle realization.
- Separates selection of the right project from realization of the selected project.
- Names lifecycle capital-allocation loss as the target problem for later empirical and formal work.
- Maps research branches and evidence burdens without claiming completed proof.
Boundaries for public reading
The paper sets architecture and agenda. It leaves completed proof, new valuation formulas, M&V replacement, financing schemes, technology recommendations, and policy-scale claims to work that would need its own evidence.
A navigable companion to the paper
SELRA.org provides a shorter public-facing entry point into the program. It is meant to stay navigable and updateable as the working paper and later branches develop.
Detailed formal models, case reconstructions, realization evidence, multi-case data, and behavioral or institutional explanations belong to later work. Public pages should point to those branches without overstating their maturity or disclosing unpublished apparatus in full.
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