Hacker News Reader

Just a minute while I cringe at the units.

> Yes, the water wheel will generate electricity all year round. In winter, it produces between 120 and 170 kWh per 24-hour period, with peak generation reaching up to 11 kW per hour. In summer, it generates between 3 and 5 kW per hour.

Seems like a nice complement with solar, given that they peak at each others inverse.

"kW per hour"

I've seen worse.

But yeah, "11 kW per hour" is meaningless.

Unless they're talking about the second derivative of energy I suppose: "My energy accelerates at 11kWh per hour per hour!"

Which is not a thing anybody ever does. Oh wait, it matters for peaking power plants and Marx generators but there you'd use Joules/sec/sec rather than kWh/h/h.

Surely in that world you're mostly working with latency not some sort of "acceleration". 10 outfits who can each deliver 100MW in 5-10 seconds, does not give you 100MW in a second, it gives you 1GW in 5-10 seconds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com