this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Because nobody's used to seeing Joules, you could swap in kJ for kW-seconds but then you probably need to switch base (MJh) to keep it practical, and now people need to do extra math to tell what will be on their power bill
But go ahead and call your power company to get them to list Joules
My power company provides me electricity in kWh, and heating (in the form of hot water) in GJ. And my cold water gets charged in m3.
So they DO know. For a few years, they'd even "helpfully" translate the GJ into kWh, untill it started to piss off people who bought electric heaters and found that those two numbers weren't actually the same in the real world.
My power company DOES tell me in Joules, but only for gas so that's already bullshit, and I live in Alberta so people already can't decipher their fucking power bill's opaque energy/distribution fee/transmission fee costs so that's bullshit too
In the U.S., they meter gas by the "therm," which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It's a misconception that it's equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.
BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.
Also, don't confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.
Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.
But ...we're human - bullshit is really all we've got.
I suppose there is science, but eww...