Talk:Hydroelectricity in the United Kingdom

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Kilowatts[edit]

Kilowatts is an unhelpfully small unit of measurement when it comes to this kind of information and makes the information from this page difficult to compare to other pages showing hydro capacity in other countries. For industrial power generation the standard is megawatts, and when looking at country wide gigawatts is often used. Looking to the main page on hydroelectricity, installed capacity is listed in GW, and the planned projects are listed in MW, and that should be carried over to this page to make those numbers easily comparable.

When the minimum number allowed on the list is a thousand and the highest is over a million, there's no reason why not to change it to MW, chop off three 0s and give people an accurate understanding of what the numbers mean in comparison to other similar numbers.

The main hydroelectric page lists 'small' hydro as up to 10MW, which almost all of the listed facilities fall into. However, the list makes them look much bigger - 1,000KW looks much bigger than 1MW.

As an example - The Three Gorges Dam in China produces ~22,500 MW of power. The Glenlee plant in Scotland produces 24,000 KW, and the Dinorwig plant 1,728,000 KW. If you're someone who doesn't know much about energy and specifically about how much of a difference in scale there is between KW and MW, then it could easily appear that Glenlee is comparable to Three Gorges (it's almost a thousand times smaller) and just at a glance Dinorwig looks bigger (it's thirteen times smaller).

Obviously comparing the UK's fledgling hydro generation to the largest plants in the world isn't the most favorable comparison, but it doesn't help people understand the subject better by using different units. The UK hydro industry is relatively small, and for some good reasons (pursuing other technologies, lack of suitable locations for very large scale plants etc) and I think people will understand that better if we give the figures the same as we would for another nation with a more developed hydro infrastructure.

Maybe it's not a huge deal, but mixing units across a subject can only cause confusion. There is no reason to do so at all. 86.181.37.146 (talk) 14:25, 14 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]