• azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    HARD disagree. You can make anything sound terrible or impressive this way, by changing the comparison point.

    Honestly if they said “for 6 hours” rather than “for two days”, would the effect not have been the exact same? Still sounds extremely impressive! Yet it’s a 400% difference. The number they give is not a useful metric at all, it just sounds nice.
    Such literary tactics are used all the time to make things sound good or bad, regardless of any kind of “objective” merit.
    Often it’s clueless journalists copy/pasting these “layman’s comparisons” from marketing material, without contextualizing or giving hard numbers. That’s extremely misleading and blindly plays into the marketer’s/politician’s hands.

    At least this article gives hard figures (13 MW/turbine, 3.6 GW total, which is honestly most of the substance of the article) as well as an actually relevant comparison for the layman (2.5x more powerful than the previous biggest power plant in the UK). Which is good (both the numbers themselves and the article including them).

    Anyway sorry for the rant but as someone with an interest in renewables, I see too much of this shitty journalistic practice. I guess it can be neat, but at best it’s eye-catching but not actually useful information, and at worst it is just outright propaganda.