Orders of Magnitude

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.

Let's take an example. To be fair, I just googled “powerplant million homes” and clicked on the first link. Here we have the Clinton Power Station, a nuclear power plant that generates 1,065 MW of electricity and serves, as Exelon has so nicely converted for us, 1 million average homes. This is absolutely the standard way that all energy companies present their powerplants. The issue here is that I dont think anybody actually knows intuitively how big 1 million homes is? Do you know how many homes are in your neightborhood, town, county, state, or country? Do you have any knowledge that will let you relate 1 million homes to something you really understand?

It was not until recently, when I was explaining the tedious and assumption-filled process of converting from MW to homes that I realized I did not even really know what 1 million homes looked like. It occurred to me that probably very few people are actually able to grasp 1 million homes. The order of magnitude is just too big. We know what one home is, we probably can imagine 10 or maybe even 100 homes in our immediate area, but 1 millinon? 

To drive this home, look at the picture below. Imagine if you took those houses and just put them in a grid with identically sized lots and no roads. For me, even after creating this picture, the difference between 100 and a million is just too big. It seems wrong, and thats the problem. We are so used to thinking about everything in a linear scale we know 1 million is bigger then 100, but we dont actually intuitively know how much bigger. Instead we think linearly: "100 is a big number, 1 million is bigger though, what more do you want from me".

So why does this matter? It matters because the people building the power plant need to express accurately what they are doing. Building a power plant that can provide electricity to that many people takes a colossal amount of technical, social, and political work. To be successful they need to be able to show what a tremendous amount of power they will be able to provide. And, although it is the standard way of doing it, I dont think the millions of home conversion is doing them justice. People intuitively underestimating just how big 1 million homes really is, and thus, how big the project really is. 

The energy sector is not the only place with this problem. Take NASA for example. Want them to go to mars? Sure, I mean, we went to the moon! Quick, how far away do you think mars is? Its 78 million km. The moon is just 380,000 km. Wow, mars is a lot further away. But really how much further? Can you trust yourself to really understand? Probably not. Lets use another graphical analogy. Below, the lengths of each rectangle represent the overal travel distances. Did you really think it was that much longer to mars, I didn't?

So how do we solve this? At REbound, we have talked about this a lot and to be totally honest, we dont have a good solution yet. But I think the key is to keep in mind both sides of the problem:  relatable units and scales. This means the values we use to describe our projects must have units that any human in our society can understand and, at the same time, must be limited to an easily understood scale. 

So lets take the 1 million homes from above. The units are great, but the scale is unknowable. Instead, it needs to be an order people can relate too.  Here are some factually accurate examples:

• In 1 hour, the power plant generates as much electricity as you will consume in your lifetime
• In 1 year the power plant generates roughly as much electricity as Sacramento county consumes in a year
• About 15 power plants like this one could power the entire state of Illinois

Again, I am not saying that I have the perfect way of expressing large values; there are clear problems with each of the above examples, but then again, there is a clear problem with saying "1 million homes". Orders of magnitude will likely always be a problem when Humans are concerned, but ignoring the issues wont help. I think developing other ways of expressing large numbers is a good place to start.