Like most people in the energy world, I constantly find
myself trying to explain numbers with large orders of magnitude. This is an issue when
trying to describe any kind of energy technology: “This system has 600kWh of storage”
or “This power plant capacity is 250MW”.
Clearly, and unapologetically so, a random person on the street is not going to “get”
those values. At first, this looks like a units problem. Joe Smith does not
have any idea what a MW is or how it relates to his life.
In the energy industry, the common thing to do is to convert
this unit into something that everybody can relate too, like number of homes
powered. This is a great first step, but I think it leaves out the other side
of the problem: orders of magnitude. Humans, in general, are terrible at
grasping and comparing large numbers. So simply converting the number is not
enough.
