I have an idea. At the beginning of each month, the game will offer to sell you a new type of energy-one that cannot be traded.
First, it will offer 100 of this energy for 500 crowns. After you buy that batch, you must wait 24 hours before buying another batch. The next batch however, will cost 1000 crowns instead. Each batch after that will cost 500 more than the last.
At some point, perhaps around 6000, people will begin to be inclined to either buy energy with real money, or buy from the market now that they have saved a good amount of crowns. The demand for energy will rise, but people will be able to afford it this time around.
I don't know who in the right mind is buying energy for 8000 crowns, but something's wrong with you man.
Nobody does buy energy for that price, even now when there's less than 5k energy total on the sales board, it's 6k. In any case, this probably won't make a meaningful impact. People will just buy the untradeable energy until it surpasses the tradeable energy in price, which it probably will in the first week or so, it'll just introduce much more free energy to the system.
Really, this is just a long, fancy way of saying 'give us X amount more Mist Energy' while throwing in a sort of crownsink spin on it.
All in all, though, something needs to be done. There's no way to play this game a reasonable amount of time without delving into using Crystal Energy, which is very limited. This game's energy economy is basically emulating what Peak Oil would be like.
Oh, just thought I'd throw in, I COULD buy energy for 8k and turn a decent profit. The problem is that there won't be any energy before long. There's no reason for the people who buy energy to ever buy again. The only thing we could do is invite lots of newbies in the hope that someone buys a 20/50 dollar pack and shares the love. (Drilling for wells. Dohohoho) We need a more sustainable system.