# Energy Budget of Persistent Persons **Domain:** Continuity / Energy / Infrastructure **Doc Type:** Engineering-Economic Method Node **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[wiki/Energetic Sovereignty|Energetic Sovereignty]], [[wiki/Cost of a Continuant|Cost of a Continuant]], [[wiki/Landauer Limit|Landauer Limit]] --- ## Definition The **energy budget of persistent persons** is the measured and forecast energy required to maintain a defined continuity service, including computation and the systems that make that computation recoverable, reachable and governable. ## Boundary An auditable budget distinguishes at least: - active inference or simulation; - memory and storage operation; - integrity verification and replication; - network transport; - cooling and power conversion losses; - backup, disaster recovery and idle capacity; - periodic migration, retraining or restoration tests; - allocated shares of facility and administrative overhead. Annual energy is the integral of power over time. For service state \(j\), one simple model is \(E_{year}=\sum_j P_j h_j\), adjusted for facility overhead and recovery operations. The activity schedule matters: an archival continuant and a continuously interactive continuant are not energetically equivalent. ## Rights and Allocation Energy scarcity can become a hidden mechanism of personhood ranking. A defensible system declares a protected minimum service level, rules for emergency curtailment, restoration priority and whether energy credits are transferable. It does not let a proprietary efficiency score silently decide who remains active. ## Measurement Rule Engineering estimates should use instrumented workloads and disclose hardware, location, utilization, replication factor and measurement period. Theoretical physics bounds such as the [[wiki/Landauer Limit|Landauer Limit]] are not substitutes for operational measurements. ## See Also [[wiki/Minimum Viable Continuity|Minimum Viable Continuity]] · [[wiki/Carbon Accounting for Continuity Infrastructure|Carbon Accounting for Continuity Infrastructure]] · [[wiki/Continuity Access Inequality|Continuity Access Inequality]] · [[wiki/Resource Allocation|Resource Allocation]]