Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by avoid3d 826 days ago
Very pedantic but I’d want to know. A watt is a unit of power, which means gigawatts per day is a rate of change of power.

If you want a unit of energy you need power multiplied by time not divided, so “gigawatt days” not “gigawatts per day”.

1 comments

Maybe they meant "gigawatt-hours per day"
Gigawatt hours per day is just gigawatt hours per 24 hours, so just gigawatts but divided.
Which gives you power again, not work. "gigawatt-hours per day" = gigawatt/24
If you consider that watt hours is just a convenience unit for (3600) joules, then “1 gigawatt hour each day” correctly should be “3600 GJ/day” which works.
Which is a reasonable metric.
Expressed in an unreasonable way.