Bruce: Using GW has little to do with it being known or unknown. Any number of energy units in use are not known to somebody (many!) and that is one of the reasons why the science/engineering illiterate American politicians cannot agree on the energy issues.
Among the dozens of units and symbols for energies one sees, I particularly dislike "millions of tonnes of oil equivalents" and similar contraptions. The GW is not any more confusing than those contraptions including millions of quads per fortnight, or billions of watts, or this beauty (I quote): "..... an average of about 66 megawatt hours in an hour." I observe that more Americans know of W than of hp, let alone Btu/hr (per min, sec, day, ...) or whatever made-up unit. And who knows how much a billion is? There are peoples to whom "billion" means not the US billion even in English, and ASME is "ASME International". You and me are in the business of promoting metric for the good of this country. When then would you suggest we start using SI to reap its full advantage? The I-P peoples, it seems to me, learn units by assimilation of the observed rather than systematically. Thus seeing and hearing SI units and prefixes will sink in (gets learned) just as any other unit did. People do not need to be told it is metric. The GW can be viewed just as the Btu, quad, or tonne of oil equivalents. We have been "selling metric" and failing as you point out. It's time to change course. Sell units, forget about selling metric. How to sell units? Use them. When? Now. Where? Everywhere. Aside from the metrication promotion, I cannot imagine trying to show the renewables analyses results in anything but coherent units. It happens that the only coherent units are SI. Not my fault - I'd have to invent it if it did not exist. Thanks for the comment. Stan ----- Original Message ----- From: Bruce Barrow To: [email protected] Sent: 09 May 06, Wednesday 08:55 Subject: Re: [SI] Letter to ed Stan, I certainly support your discussions on renewable energy. Let me respectfully suggest that the problem with your sales pitch as a sales pitch may be not the numbers, but the GW. Is that symbol known to mechanical engineers? Is the gigawatt understandable to that audience? Would billions of kilowatts have been more easily received? We have a giga-ntic problem in selling metric -- it is tera-bly confusing to the general public, and possibly even to mechanical engineers. :-) Bruce ----- Original Message ----- From: Stan Jakuba To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 9:49 PM Subject: [SI] Letter to ed The Mechanical Engineering magazine published an excerpt from the letter I had posted here earlier. Unfortunately, the published version, while promoting metric, omitted the metric numbers. Here is the MSWord version of the original. It has been my experience with most publications that they resent numbers ("we do not want to confuse our readers" (!)). Maybe my engineering background makes me think that numbers are more useful than adjectives such as huge, expensive, skyrocketing, ..... that one reads and hear endlessly. But I do agree that numbers in I-P units can indeed be confusing. :-) Stan Jakuba
