Times they is Worryin

well the slower of thinking, and there will be many, will only learn after they have been caught out a few times . Freezer owners, and there are far more since 1970s will need to plan very carefully when they actually open them. I wonder how many folk who have shed a landline, will be surprised that mobile phone base stations are not required to have battery back up.

But perfectly possible, perfectly survivable, and the timing rostas are already in the public domain.

anyone who doubts it is possible should look at the recent lock-downs, which many said were impossible, but actually operated pretty well all considered. Of course if it was a good idea or not is another matter.

Mike.

Energy crisis: UK expands gas emergency exercise ahead of winter - BBC News

Dad, what's a Therm? Old Tom Cobblers says that a British Thermal Unit is the heat needed to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Farenheit. It is confusing Dad. Is a Therm related to a BTU?

Z.

Therms seem to be the popular unit these days. It would be more sensible in my view to use Kilowatt hours  or Megawatt hours.

One therm=29.3 kwh. Accurate value.

One them= 30 kwh as an .approximation when doing fag packet calculations.

One therm of gas burnt in a power station=approximately 10 kwh of electricity, varies according to the efficiency of the power station but 10 kwh is a fair estimate.

One Therm is about 30kWhrs  (wiki article ).

Considering we went metric in 1970, and quite a lot of folk writing articles like one that were not even born then, some of the arcane units cast a surprisingly long shadow. The tedious maths this often entails makes you long for a pint half litre (!)

Mike

At least we dont measure water in "acre feet" which they do in the USA. That sounds to me like more like an animal illness ! As in "poor creature got acre feet, so I shot her to prevent suffering."

Referring across to another thread, the Americans seem to measure air conditioning and heat pumps in "tons".  I have no idea how that translates into kilowatts.

1 "ton" = 12,000 Btu per hour.

Acre feet seems reasonable to me - how big is your farm, and how deep is the flood water?

Any of these have to be better than the output of PV systems - often given in kWh/year. Why not just kW?

Chris Pearson said:

Any of these have to be better than the output of PV systems - often given in kWh/year. Why not just kW?

Because the output of the system varies wildly from hour to hour.  Mine could be anything between 0kW and 3.4kW,  So people usually quote the typical total output over a year.

I think it sounds more impressive if you measure it in MWh per year.

Yes but you are still using a unit which includes time per time.

because you are indicating a time-average over the year, daily generation is very bumpy - indeed zero at night...

Mike