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guineapigfrench t1_iwz3yqa wrote

This is really poor data analysis, let alone the display. Energy, power, and electricity still have poorly communicated and confused units in the public's mind, and the job of this site is to make it more clear.

I'll start with two definitions.

Energy: think of this as the potential to complete work, e.g. having a ball sitting at the top of a hill (potential energy), or a charged up battery. Measured in Joules, or commonly kilowatt-hours (KWh), the amount of energy that a source of 1 kilowatt of power provides over 1 hour.

Power: the flow of energy, per unit time. Common units include Watts (1 joule per second), or Horsepower (US customary system).

The main unit of analysis they're using in this article is a "MWh," or megawatt-hour. This is the amount of energy that a power source of 1 Megawatt generates over an hour. So they compare power sources by unit of energy, per unit of land area. A fixed quantity of energy per area of land. What does that even mean? They really should be discussing power per unit of land.

I think, and it's really not made clear here, that they're discussing the average amount of energy per year, which gives you this strange unit of power that the author made up, of megawatt hours per year (two time units in the same metric?)

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[deleted] t1_iwzbk0s wrote

No, they are using power (MWh per year). The reason you use a long duration like that is because some power sources like wind and solar vary a lot from day to day and hour to hour so you average them over a year.

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guineapigfrench t1_iwzcri7 wrote

Mr./Ms. Duck,

I noted that at the end of my comment:

>I think, and it's really not made clear here, that they're discussing the average amount of energy per year, which gives you this strange unit of power that the author made up, of megawatt hours per year (two time units in the same metric?)

And I probably should have included an alternative suggestion, that instead of creating a new power unit, they simply say "kilowatts" and average across the year. It would be weird for them to pick one hour, say the 5am-6am hour of March 20th, and use that as a comparison- I would assume they're working in averages, but it would be good to state that explicitly.

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[deleted] t1_iwzd19h wrote

Anyone who works in the industry would already understand because this is a normal unit of measure.

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guineapigfrench t1_iwzeio7 wrote

This is not for "anyone who works in the industry," the site "ourworldindata" has a self-declared purpose: "The goal of our work is to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable."

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