Holy fuck, that is irritating. I was still in bed. Leaving it for posterity. Thanks for pointing it out. Even more irritating, I said each “billion” is a group of six zeros. Technical definitions aside, should have been “million”.

Oh. You’re talking about kilowatts. They use kilowatts because they’re trying to make it relatable to individual household usage.

Sometimes I wonder how often there are translation issues between languages, and this was a false positive in my brain, so I’ll leave the original (edited) comment here:

In different language systems, “billion” means 1,000,000,000,000. What we call a billion, some call a thousand million. Each “billion” meaning a group of six zeros. Now Americans and other English speakers use"short" scale. French still uses “long” scale, as do other languages. So when they say “thousand billion,” they probably are talking about what we English speakers call a quintillion: 1,000,000,000,000,000. (Checked a source, this is not a recent development)

Lol, Tomb of Horrors last resort wish gem.

GPIB users and instrumentation automating folks know the problem is very modern.

His name was Terry Davis.

You mean you wouldn’t expect a software engineer to understand the coefficient of thermal expansion of tungsten carbide in a gas lubricated piston/cylinder pneumatic deadweight calibration system?

Yeah, me either. But I would expect one to know how to research the documentation to find out what it meant.