Why is the power meter reporting MWh?

Question

I noticed that the power graph values are labeled MWh where they should just be MW. The measurements are not interchangeable.

Comments

While at it, make it change based on how much power you have in the network. No point reporting KW, when you are making 100+ GW

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Oops, my memory played a trick on me and it's actually in MWh, but the argument still stands.

Answer 1

Exactly! It should definitely be in MW and not MWh because MW is a unit of power (load on the grid) whereas MWh is a measure of energy consumption (the utilisation of power (MW) * a unit of time (1 hour, h)).

The fact that it's showing the power generation and not the total energy you have consumed means that the unit should definitely be the megawatt and not the megawatt*hour.

Hope they fix this soon.

Comments

Yes, exactly. Thanks for elaborating! Now I wouldn't mind having the total spent energy available (because I just like having metrics), but currently it wouldn't stand to much use. The power economy in the game is currently based mostly on the availability of power at a given moment rather than the availability of energy per se.
On the same streak, for some reason the production of items have a power requirement expressed in MW, which doesn't really make much sense either since it's just the same as the nominal power of whichever machine you use to build it: it's not a very useful metric. In this case, expressing the requirement in MWh would make sense, but it would probably still require changes to the game logic to actually be useful.
I'll leave the actual game mechanics to be decided by the studio, but I still wish the unit labels on metrics would be correct to avoid confusion.

Answer 2

The simple answer (And probably not the one you want to hear): It's that way because that's how the developers chose to program their game. If you want them to change it then perhaps I might suggest you ask nicely and politely, instead of outright demanding it should be something else.