we didn't already have joules though. the units were devised at about the same time, in the late 19th century

I like J as a shorthand for kWh or Newton-meters in units that incorporate joules.

kWh consumed per month makes more sense inside my heart than joules consumed per month.

I had to take the same intro-physics course twice despite passing both with perfect As, because of Paper reasons, so Joules will always be kilogram-meters-meters-per-second-squared to me. If someone expresses them as Pascal-cubic-meters or Coulomb-Volts then I will feel honestly quite Disgusted

It gets worse! In the EU large appliances like refrigerators or washing machines have their power usage specified in kWh/1000 h… which is just watts

Well I mean specifically that a watt is defined as one joule of energy per second, energy over time. Then we multiply that by time and we're left with a kWh being the same dimension as the Joule.

It's like if we measured distance by saying how many "velocity seconds" apart things were. (Which we do in space, we measure vast distances by light seconds but that's not my point)

It's worse than it being watts, IMO. 1 kWh = 3.6 megajoules. It's just a weird scaling factor.

ah, so the watt wasn't defined to be one joule per second the mid 20th century. before that it was close by coincidence but not exactly that.