Friday 19 June 2015

I think effort is required to be this technically illiterate!

BBC Scotland reports today on a new hydro scheme: "Plans lodged with Dumfries and Galloway Council said the scheme will generate about 700 megawatts a year." Now obviously a scheme that delivered energy output at a rate that was accelerating by 700 MW per year would be fantastic: if initial output was zero, within a decade it could be generating all the electricity used in Scotland (less than 6GW) - but I knew the BBC must have got this wrong and presumably the plans were either for a big 700MW scheme, or for a small scheme that generated 700MWhrs per year. They helpfully provided a link.

In a moment of prevarication, I clicked through and saw that the plans said neither! They actually said 100kW. So the journalist must have converted 100kW to 100kWhrs per hour, then multiplied by approximately 350 days per year, and by approximately 20hrs per day to get 700MWhrs per year, and then reported it as 700MW "a" year.

This is mind blowing semi-competent incompetence!

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