Procedure – Purchasing items in EA

Every item may require a chain of providers to produce (usually the raw materials, and processing in several steps, including transportation).

Resource flow and energy cost involved in a purchase.

In order to provide for the energy cost of each organization in the chain, the consumer would have to order the required resources from each of them. This may require knowledge that a realistic consumer does not have.

Instead some of the organizations take on the role of an EC proxy, They select the suppliers for some of the required services, based on their relevance to the product and bill their energy cost to the costumer in their name. The EC obtained in this way must simply be forwarded to the appropriate provider endpoints. This way, the consumer gets a simple final cost that can easily be compared between providers.