Joules is the solution to both the problems (the second is that Wh for energy is as silly as speed hours for distance)

Watt-hours is a perfectly pragmatic unit. Measure instantaneous power and multiply by a common human unit of time. It's easy to compare.

Part of me is tempted to suggest kilograms as a unit of energy.

428.6 kg relativistic mass-energy equivalent: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10.7PWh%2F%28c%5E2%29

But then, I am a silly person.

Call the unit "Kilogram-Joules", abbreviate as KgJ and it works pretty damn well and unambiguously.

The problem is we don't live in a society powered by matter-antimatter annihilation reactions, or black evaporation so it's not really useful - unlike say, the electron-volt which at least serves physicists nicely.

>(the second is that Wh for energy is as silly as speed hours for distance)

This would be a devastating own if a single Joule wasn't exactly equal to a Watt-second.

I was reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units and a few related the other day for fun and pleasing moment, and one thing I retained from that is that "The kilogram is the only coherent SI unit whose name and symbol include a prefix." Also that the standard explicitly forbid redundant use of prefixes like kilo-kilo-.

I guess that if you want to stick to TWh you can use

- 10700

- 10,700

- 10.7×10³

- 1.07×10⁴

- 10.7e3

- 1.07e4

- 29E8₁₆

SI prefix words are just kind of silly. We should just use the exponent as a number instead of having a different word for every 3 zeros. 10.7 E15 Wh or something similar.

Scales to everything, you do not need to know any mapping, and directly supports mathematical manipulation.

We should also do the same for large number words in general. No thousand, million, billion, etc. E3, E6, E9, etc. Now you can count and represent any meaningful number without needing to memorize a dictionary of words and they would precisely match the unit scale “words”.

I agree! I use ^3 etc for the notation: https://saul.pw/mag

You mean 1.07E16

It's pretty common in some contexts to only use Es for powers of 1000, so 100,000,000 is 100e6 rather than 1e8.

That's commonly called engineering notation.

We should be. Why? Because reasonable estimates of the amount of extra energy contained within the atmosphere due to anthropogenic effects are in the single digit petawatt range. It's a number everyone should be carrying in their heads.

Put a different way: the total annual harvestable solar yield is within an order of magnitude of the energy we've caused to accumulate inside the atmospheric boundary. Think about that, for a second or two.

The correct solution is 10.7Pwh. We are often exposed to 'Peta' when dealing with data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

Well, given that the intent is to communicate, using GWh is probably ideal. 10.7 million GWh is probably the easiest to understand and compare, given that GWh is probably the most commonly used unit for this purpose.