Hacker News Reader

Huh. So they are really talking about a pressure.

1 kWh/(acre ft) = 2919 Pa

It makes a great deal of intuitive sense that the quantity that describes how hard it is to move water over a path is a pressure.

Yes, they must have meant kilowatt hours. Was there no editor?

Scientific mistakes in a paper like the new yorker is like poor grammar in a startup CEO's writing.

It just happens.

It's sad that they mistook kilowatts for kilowatt-hours, but I think acre-foot is a good unit for measuring volumes of water. It helps communicate the scale of water use.

Depends, though I suspect you're right.

But expressing energy requirements as power per unit can be quite useful. As in, kW per person or square meter. Though in that case you'd be expressing water delivery as a rate: acrefoot/day, say.