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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Two billion thousand. If only we'd come up with a better way to say that. Like some kind of system of metrics. Lmk if we come up with something
Don't even get me started on how Wh is energy divided by time multiplied by time.
It works out to 7.2 PJ/year, or 228 MW average power output.
Roughly 250,000 houses of power.
Eh I can sort of understand it in this case - many people are used to thinking of things in amounts of kilowatt hours.
If your journey was 1200 kilometres people might look at you strangely for saying 1.2 megametres
I'd argue that's only because km is a very ingrained part of everyday parlance. The use of a megalitre for example would not raise an eyebrow where I live.
Similarly megawatt and gigawatt are pretty common and for things on a global scale terawatts is not unheard of, I don't see why it would be so different for TWh to resort to an arcane way of formatting it.
Don't get me wrong I'm not autistic enough to not see your point, it's just tilting to me to make these extra jumps. Esp. when Wh is already a cursed unit
Oh. You're talking about kilowatts. They use kilowatts because they're trying to make it relatable to individual household usage.
Sometimes I wonder how often there are translation issues between languages, and this was a false positive in my brain, so I'll leave the original (edited) comment here:
In different language systems, "billion" means 1,000,000,000,000. What we call a billion, some call a thousand million. Each "billion" meaning a group of six zeros. Now Americans and other English speakers use"short" scale. French still uses "long" scale, as do other languages. So when they say "thousand billion," they probably are talking about what we English speakers call a quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000. (Checked a source, this is not a recent development)
Irritatingly, that's a quadrillion, not a quintillion.
Holy fuck, that is irritating. I was still in bed. Leaving it for posterity. Thanks for pointing it out. Even more irritating, I said each "billion" is a group of six zeros. Technical definitions aside, should have been "million".
Ever since I watched this Numberphile video, I've been disappointed at how widespread the "short" scale is.
Since the standard unit of electricity delivery is kWh, this notation makes way more sense to the average person than 2 TWh