I have to agree with you on context, especially for technical and energy-issues stories. And yes, journalists are exceptionally lacking and poor in this regard.
That said, there are tools out there which help. There's an immense wealth of information available online -- we can look up the population of Beijing (20 million, via Wikipedia), the International Energy Agency and other sources have various energy statistics.
A favorite tool of mine is gnu 'units', a commandline calculator that many people associate with simple transformations from feet to meters. But that misses out on its key capabilities -- it's really an advanced units-aware calculator with a large number of built-in values. I just found earlier today that this includes paper sizes:
$ units 'A4paper'
Definition: 210 mm 297 mm = 0.06237 m^2
It's also extensible -- I've added 'hiroshima' as an energy unit. Given the context of the current discussion, that in tons of coal equivalent:
$ units '1 hiroshima' 'toncoal'
* 1942.6672
/ 0.0005147562
Getting back to your question, how does one 845 MW plan compare with Beijing's energy usage?
You have: 845MW / 20 million
You want: watt
* 42.25
/ 0.023668639
... I presume China's power supply exceeds 42 watts per capita (though I happen to know from context that third-world nations are at roughly this level). Wikipedia again tells us that the national average is 458 watts/person, which probably includes less-developed rural areas. So it's likely that the shuttered power plant is at best 1/10 Beijing's power supply, quite possibly less than that.
That said, there are tools out there which help. There's an immense wealth of information available online -- we can look up the population of Beijing (20 million, via Wikipedia), the International Energy Agency and other sources have various energy statistics.
A favorite tool of mine is gnu 'units', a commandline calculator that many people associate with simple transformations from feet to meters. But that misses out on its key capabilities -- it's really an advanced units-aware calculator with a large number of built-in values. I just found earlier today that this includes paper sizes:
It's also extensible -- I've added 'hiroshima' as an energy unit. Given the context of the current discussion, that in tons of coal equivalent: For more discussion, features, and use:https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1x9u0f/gnu_uni...
Getting back to your question, how does one 845 MW plan compare with Beijing's energy usage?
... I presume China's power supply exceeds 42 watts per capita (though I happen to know from context that third-world nations are at roughly this level). Wikipedia again tells us that the national average is 458 watts/person, which probably includes less-developed rural areas. So it's likely that the shuttered power plant is at best 1/10 Beijing's power supply, quite possibly less than that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
That said, yes, poor and sloppy contextualization on the part of Bloomberg and Feifei Shen.