The Problem: It’s difficult to know what a number of Gigawatts means in media reporting.
The Solution: The UrbaWatt metric – how much power an average city uses.
When James Watt was trying to market his newly invented steam engines to replace the reliance on horses as a means of power in the 18th century, he found that many people struggled to understand what he was offering.
So he came up with the idea of measuring how much a horse could lift in a given time and terming that sum ‘Horsepower’, and then marketing his steam engines as having so many horsepower.
That caught on, as people had a good feel for what a horse could do, and therefore how much more powerful a machine that could produce several hundred or thousand horsepower’s would be.
We now need the same for describing grid-scale electricity. As more renewable energy is brought on stream and grid capacity becomes ever more important to understanding if the lights will be kept on, Gigawatts and households simply aren’t an easily understandable metric.
I’ve seen references to a new wind farm being able to power ‘1 million homes’ or ‘10,000 households’, but I still don’t really know what that means.
What I want to know is how much power does the UK use as a whole, and how much does an average city like Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham consume?
The UrbaWatt would be loosely based on such metrics, with one UrbaWatt equivalent to the amount of energy consumed by an average city to make it more easily comprehensible.
Whenever the UrbaWatt was referred to, an article could also include how many UrbaWatts were needed to power the whole country.
The point is to come up with a simple term that is easily understood by people and can therefore help average Joe newspaper reader better understand the power of additions to the Grid and what is required for their country.
It has a neat circularity that an 18th Century approach originally being used to drive forward the industrial revolution would now be adapted to the 21st Century decarbonisation of the grid.
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