Bull in a china shop: Is there a measure of level of organization of energy (flow) to do work?

Question

The discussion around the second law of thermodynamics and creation of orderly structures (e.g. life, evolution, etc.) is an old one. Now that creationists learned the difference between open vs. closed/isolated systems, one argument that I commonly see is a "bull in a china shop" analogy. They say "Fine, energy flows in open systems allowing their entropy to decrease locally, but this energy is completely 'raw' and 'disorderly'. Actual work in man-made systems are highly fine-tuned designs that allow energy to flow in certain ways. Energy from the Sun is just randomly flowing energy and it cannot do meaningful work towards complexity, just like a bull has raw energy in a china shop but it will never create meaningful designs."

I understand how they are trying to deflect their misunderstanding of the second law, but it got me thinking: Is there a measure for such an "level of organization of energy flow"? And how would you approach such an argument?

Answer 1

Yes, it is called exergy, which is the work that can be extracted from a thermodynamic energy flow. It is equal to the amount of energy input times the Carnot efficiency.

For photosynthesis the relevant amount of energy is about $1 \ \text{ kW m}^{-2}$ and the relevant Carnot efficiency is about 0.95 (the Carnot efficiency between the sun at 5778 K and the earth at an average 288 K). So we are left with about $950 \text{ W m}^{-2}$ of useable work.

The reality is that what the sun provides is a very low entropy more than a high energy. The bull in a China shop analogy is a rather poor analogy.