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Notes: The accurate quantification of the energy available for sensible and latent heat transfer from plant canopies is essential for the prediction of impacts of climate on vegetation water use and growth. Unlike agricultural fields and extensive forests of more humid zones, vegetation growing in semi-arid climates is usually sparse creating a heterogeneous surface of shrubs, annuals and bare soil. Under these conditions many of the assumptions of the basic equations used in microclimatology, which assume a uniform vegetated surface, may be violated. It is proposed here that heterogeneous canopies may require a formulation of their energy balance that includes a measure of the canopy complexity in order to both interpret field measurements and be used in predictive models. This paper explores the need for a more complex formulation of the vegetation energy balance through a series of experiments on a sparse clumped shrubland of Retama sphaerocarpa in the Tabernas Desert, Almería, south-east Spain. These experiments investigated the importance of the radiative properties of each surface on energy balance of soil, annuals and shrubs individually, and the surface as a whole. The study evaluated the use of the fractional vegetative cover (f) and the radiative characteristics of each surface (reflection coefficients and emissivities) for calculating net radiation partitioning between shrubs and bare soil. Results indicated that partitioning of net radiation between components could be accurately calculated from values of fractional vegetative cover, reflection coefficients and emissivities for both bare soil and plant surfaces. A sensitivity analysis showed the importance of specific radiation properties of each surface. Measurements of horizontal long-wave fluxes between components showed that the location of a plant with respect to other plants made little difference to its long-wave energy balance. The results also emphasized the importance of soil water content on the energy balance, through its influence on albedo and soil heat storage. This was particularly true when measurements of soil heat flux were used to measure the available energy for soil under shrubs and bare soil because of strong hysteresis cycles. These cycles were larger in the bare soil than in the substrate under shrubs.