power versus energy good article very well cited user dick mills while very many people confuse the terminology for power and energy it is particularly embarrassing to do it in an article with such a title the watt is a unit of power the rate of consumption power can not be consumed energy which can be consumed is measured in watt hours or joules the openening sentences which say in the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was estimated at tw with from burning fossil fuels this is equivalent to zj j per year should be changed to in the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was estimated at zj j with from burning fossil fuels the average rate of consumption is thus tw similarly the labels on the the graphs should be changed unfortunately the association of consumption with power watts continues throughout the article again the energy used to generate tw of electricity is approximately tw as the efficiency of a typical existing power plant is around is incorrect one needs tw of power not energy to create tw of power at efficiency even more unfortunate i worry that some of the numbers are wrong because of the confusion between power and energy for things like wind where a mw generator operates at only capacity factor the difference between installed capacity and average production over a long period of time is a dominating factor i checked a couple of the references cited and they too use power and energy inconsistently it will take a major rewrite to correct this article both the nomenclature and the numbers need to be checked