One of the worst experiences in any halfway-conscientious journalist's life is when someone tells you you've made a mistake. This just happened to me, so I thought I'd describe what happened and what my editors and I did about it. This also seems a good place to spell out something about corrections: it's not a novel insight by any means, but I think it's a useful one.
In September I wrote a feature for BBC Future about an emerging trend of old fossil fuel power plants being turned into battery storage sites. Here it is (no paywall):
The UK coal-fired power station that became a giant battery
The story is built around a case study of a site in Ferrybridge, UK. It also highlights some other examples from around the world, and digs into some numbers to estimate how much more battery storage the UK will need if it's to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 while ensuring a reliable supply of electricity.
After the story was published, two readers flagged an apparent mistake on social media. On Threads, @sambeaujones posted:
"Dear BBC (and Michael Marshall @michaelmarshall6504), GW is not a measurement of battery storage capacity - GWh is. GW is a measurement of generation capacity. Yours, Grumpy."
And on Twitter/X, @CHPopp wrote:
"Great News from UK. BESS [battery energy storage systems] will become an important feature for renewable energy. One question: why is capacity denominated in GW and not in GWh?"
Oh no, I thought. While I've been writing about environmental and sustainability issues for years, my background is in biology and very much not in electrical engineering. I know that the units and terminology around electricity are quite specific and can be confusing. Had I mangled things? The two readers were making different points, but both revolved around the use of GW (gigawatts) as a unit of electrical capacity.
First, a basic point about these abbreviations. W is short for "watts" and Wh is short for "watthours". The G in front is for "giga", which means we are talking 10 to the power of 9, or a billion. So a gigawatt is a billion watts. Elsewhere in the story I talked about MW, megawatts, which means 10 to the power of 6, or a million watts. The thing that was at issue was the W bit.
The figures that were being questioned came straight from primary sources. SSE, the company building the Ferrybridge battery site, talks about capacity in MW: see for yourself. The National Grid report I had cited for projections of future BESS needs also talked about capacity in GW: again, scroll to page 119 and see for yourself. The numbers were correct. Maybe I was using these units wrong in some way, but if I was, it seemed, so were an energy company and the National Grid.
Still, I consulted the editors at BBC Future, and emailed Grazia Todeschini; an electrical engineer at King's College London whom I had interviewed for the story. She told me that, to properly describe a battery, you need two numbers: one expressed in W and one in Wh. Strictly, the W is "power" and the Wh is "capacity".
In other words, the numbers I had used were all correct, but I had used the wrong word to describe them. While the figure in W is indeed a description of "how much electricity this thing can store", it isn't technically the "capacity".
The thing is, the word "capacity" is often used loosely. The National Grid report I had relied on did so, as did many energy company websites. In fact, while this was going on, the International Energy Agency released a big report called Renewables 2024. In the executive summary, the very first graph shows growth in "renewable capacity", measured in GW. The IEA is about as authoritative as it gets on energy supply.
Armed with new knowledge, I went back to the editors, and in the spirit of dotting Is and crossing Ts they decided to remove some of the uses of the word "capacity". For various reasons they couldn't remove them all: for instance, some are in direct quotes from interviewees, which can't be edited.
This is what a fact-checking process looks like. I went back to my documentary sources, and explicitly asked an expert in the field if I had done anything wrong. And then the editors tweaked the article accordingly.
I want to end by saying something about the importance of corrections. Mistakes are inevitable in any body of work, so despite my instinctual panic there's no shame in it. The important thing is to be open-minded when someone calls you out for a slip, to tell the editors immediately, to investigate, and ultimately to be willing to make a change.
I'm also a believer in openness. Apart from ensuring accuracy, I think it builds trust. A lot of ink has been spilled, rightly, about newspapers burying corrections deep in the inside pages, where hardly anyone will see them. It seems to me this is fine if it was something minor, like a spelling mistake or a slightly wrong date for a historical event. However, it becomes wildly problematic if the correction is an admission that an entire story was nonsense, especially if the story in question was promoted on the front page or otherwise a big deal. If your publication made a dramatic claim, and it was wrong, you need to correct it prominently. There is a sliding scale of mistakes, ranging from missing a full stop at the end of a paragraph (annoying but ultimately harmless) to falsely accusing someone of murder (very harmful). To my mind, the prominence of corrections needs to reflect the severity of the mistake.
Where does my "capacity" mistake fall on this spectrum? I think it isn't a big deal, for two reasons.
First, if the way I used "capacity" is a mistake, then a lot of people in the energy industry are making the same mistake. As I've documented, pretty much every source I looked at used "capacity" in the same way as me. I think it was pretty reasonable for me, as a journalist, to copy the National Grid's word choices.
Second, nobody reading the story would come away with the wrong impression. Again: all the figures are correct, as is the picture they paint of what the energy system looks like now and how it needs to change to achieve net-zero. And far from my word choice misleading readers, the lay understanding of "capacity" is "how much can this thing store", which is the right idea.
In short, this is the sort of correction that publications should absolutely make, and BBC Future did. But it's a minor one.
In September I wrote a feature for BBC Future about an emerging trend of old fossil fuel power plants being turned into battery storage sites. Here it is (no paywall):
The UK coal-fired power station that became a giant battery
The story is built around a case study of a site in Ferrybridge, UK. It also highlights some other examples from around the world, and digs into some numbers to estimate how much more battery storage the UK will need if it's to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 while ensuring a reliable supply of electricity.
After the story was published, two readers flagged an apparent mistake on social media. On Threads, @sambeaujones posted:
"Dear BBC (and Michael Marshall @michaelmarshall6504), GW is not a measurement of battery storage capacity - GWh is. GW is a measurement of generation capacity. Yours, Grumpy."
And on Twitter/X, @CHPopp wrote:
"Great News from UK. BESS [battery energy storage systems] will become an important feature for renewable energy. One question: why is capacity denominated in GW and not in GWh?"
Oh no, I thought. While I've been writing about environmental and sustainability issues for years, my background is in biology and very much not in electrical engineering. I know that the units and terminology around electricity are quite specific and can be confusing. Had I mangled things? The two readers were making different points, but both revolved around the use of GW (gigawatts) as a unit of electrical capacity.
First, a basic point about these abbreviations. W is short for "watts" and Wh is short for "watthours". The G in front is for "giga", which means we are talking 10 to the power of 9, or a billion. So a gigawatt is a billion watts. Elsewhere in the story I talked about MW, megawatts, which means 10 to the power of 6, or a million watts. The thing that was at issue was the W bit.
The figures that were being questioned came straight from primary sources. SSE, the company building the Ferrybridge battery site, talks about capacity in MW: see for yourself. The National Grid report I had cited for projections of future BESS needs also talked about capacity in GW: again, scroll to page 119 and see for yourself. The numbers were correct. Maybe I was using these units wrong in some way, but if I was, it seemed, so were an energy company and the National Grid.
Still, I consulted the editors at BBC Future, and emailed Grazia Todeschini; an electrical engineer at King's College London whom I had interviewed for the story. She told me that, to properly describe a battery, you need two numbers: one expressed in W and one in Wh. Strictly, the W is "power" and the Wh is "capacity".
In other words, the numbers I had used were all correct, but I had used the wrong word to describe them. While the figure in W is indeed a description of "how much electricity this thing can store", it isn't technically the "capacity".
The thing is, the word "capacity" is often used loosely. The National Grid report I had relied on did so, as did many energy company websites. In fact, while this was going on, the International Energy Agency released a big report called Renewables 2024. In the executive summary, the very first graph shows growth in "renewable capacity", measured in GW. The IEA is about as authoritative as it gets on energy supply.
Armed with new knowledge, I went back to the editors, and in the spirit of dotting Is and crossing Ts they decided to remove some of the uses of the word "capacity". For various reasons they couldn't remove them all: for instance, some are in direct quotes from interviewees, which can't be edited.
This is what a fact-checking process looks like. I went back to my documentary sources, and explicitly asked an expert in the field if I had done anything wrong. And then the editors tweaked the article accordingly.
I want to end by saying something about the importance of corrections. Mistakes are inevitable in any body of work, so despite my instinctual panic there's no shame in it. The important thing is to be open-minded when someone calls you out for a slip, to tell the editors immediately, to investigate, and ultimately to be willing to make a change.
I'm also a believer in openness. Apart from ensuring accuracy, I think it builds trust. A lot of ink has been spilled, rightly, about newspapers burying corrections deep in the inside pages, where hardly anyone will see them. It seems to me this is fine if it was something minor, like a spelling mistake or a slightly wrong date for a historical event. However, it becomes wildly problematic if the correction is an admission that an entire story was nonsense, especially if the story in question was promoted on the front page or otherwise a big deal. If your publication made a dramatic claim, and it was wrong, you need to correct it prominently. There is a sliding scale of mistakes, ranging from missing a full stop at the end of a paragraph (annoying but ultimately harmless) to falsely accusing someone of murder (very harmful). To my mind, the prominence of corrections needs to reflect the severity of the mistake.
Where does my "capacity" mistake fall on this spectrum? I think it isn't a big deal, for two reasons.
First, if the way I used "capacity" is a mistake, then a lot of people in the energy industry are making the same mistake. As I've documented, pretty much every source I looked at used "capacity" in the same way as me. I think it was pretty reasonable for me, as a journalist, to copy the National Grid's word choices.
Second, nobody reading the story would come away with the wrong impression. Again: all the figures are correct, as is the picture they paint of what the energy system looks like now and how it needs to change to achieve net-zero. And far from my word choice misleading readers, the lay understanding of "capacity" is "how much can this thing store", which is the right idea.
In short, this is the sort of correction that publications should absolutely make, and BBC Future did. But it's a minor one.
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