Comment on China constructs world's first dual-tower solar thermal plant — and it will help generate nearly 2 billion kWh annually

HeckGazer@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Windex007@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Don’t even get me started on how Wh is energy divided by time multiplied by time.

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• apotheotic@beehaw.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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

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  • HeckGazer@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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• judooochp@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Until the 70s, “billion” meant1,000,000,000,000. What we call a billion was a thousand million. Each “billion” meaning a group of six zeros. Now we use"short" form. French still uses “long” form. So when they say “thousand billion,” they probably are talking about what we English speakers call a quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000

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  • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    what we English speakers call a quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000

    Irritatingly, that’s a quadrillion, not a quintillion.

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    • judooochp@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Holy fuck, that is irritating. I was still in bed. Leaving it for posterity. Thanks for pointing it out

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      • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Ever since I watched this Numberphile video, I’ve been disappointed at how widespread the “short” scale is.

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• protist@mander.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Since the standard unit of electricity delivery is kWh, this notation makes way more sense to the average person than 2 TWh

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