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Abstract: Living matter consumes energy at the microscopic scale to drive emergent, large-scale behaviors such as traveling waves or coherent oscillations. These complex, spatiotemporal phenomena play pivotal roles in essential life processes, such as cell division, cell polarization, and collective migration. While much work has focused on understanding the dynamics of these behaviors, we lack a thorough understanding of their energetic underpinnings. To address this, we introduce a measure of irreversibility we term the entropy production factor that estimates energy dissipation across time and space for spatially extended systems. We use our method to study the emergence of synchronized oscillations in a model biochemical oscillator, finding signatures of the onset of oscillations in the total irreversibility, while signatures of synchronization are found in the distribution of irreversibility across spatiotemporal frequencies. This work provides a tool for understanding the connection between microscopic energy consumption and macroscopic dynamic phenomena in non-equilibrium systems.