Reply #12: Some things can't be oversimplified. [View All]

When somebody buys a car, they know that the list price is not going to be the total price of the car.
Aside from haggling, there are going to be a variety of finance options and insurance coverages which will affect the total price.
Most people are able to deal with this.

Suffixes are used to clarify power measurements.
"Wp" is used to indicate peak watts,
"Wt" is used to indicate thermal watts,
"We" is used to indicate electric watts.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Electrical_and_thermal_watts

The ISO standards for "mega" and "kilo" have always been 1,000,000 and 1,000.
Most people in Europe use the metric system, where a kilogram is still 1,000 grams.
I hope we don't have to start putting disclaimers on power plants that "one megawatt is 1000000 watts and not 1048576 watts" like they do on disk drives.