Talk:Energy in Italy

Incorrect and bizarre use of units

You describe power consumption in Wh (watt hours). That energy consumption, not power consumption, and you have to give a time interval (such as watt-hours per year). Now you are saying a watt is 8760 watt hours per year, making the number 8760 times bigger for no good reason except to make the numbers hard to understand. When it comes to PJ (petajoules), again, this must be written petajoules per year. A joule is a watt second, so you are now multiplying a watt by 31.5 million seconds per year, making the number colossal - a Petajoule is 10^15 watt seconds (10 followed by 15 zeros). Again this is being done simply to confuse the reader and there is no excuse for this. The figures should be given simply in watts, kW, MW, GW and NOT arbitrarily multiplied by large numbers. For example, a PJ per year is 31.7MW - a number that is easy to understand by any power engineer, and this is what properly belongs in the article. BrianAnalogue (talk) 07:55, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

The use of PJ and TWh is normal practice in energy engineering. The numbers in the tables obviously refer to the total during each year, since they are yearly statistics. This is what most reliable sources also use. The use of average power (MW/GW) for yearly statistics is not common practice in the literature, and instead is generally used to specify the installed capacity of plants or energy sources. Ita140188 (talk) 09:07, 17 September 2024 (UTC)