The way to make abstruse measures understandable is not to introduce even more abstruse notions. Anybody who reads their power bills knows about kWh: that’s a concrete, measurable, sensible notion. “Watts per always”—oh, geez. It makes my head hurt even typing that. Nobody except the Livermore Fire Department leaves a light burning “forever” (and eventually that tiny little bulb is going to burn out), and most of us have very few things that consume the same amount of power all the time. He’s also conflating all sorts of different kinds of power, which from an environmental standpoint is not helpful.

Double-arggh… Anyway, thanks for clearing this up: Wired only deserves part of the blame, for going along with this nonsense. And making it worse by not spelling out “Watts per always,” bizarre as that is.

It turns out he does *mean* average rate of energy consumption, but he also does make it very, very easy to misread it as a quantity. He keeps trying to put things in terms of comparison to 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously, which leads to much quantity vs. rate switching when e.g. he derives a rate from a few quantities in a year. It’s clear he knows the difference and he’s trying to make the topic “accessible”, but also very confusing. See:

http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/8/Energy%20Literacy%20Presentation.pdf