Are American electricity prices usually given as USD per Megawatt-hour? Because I found the headline wholeheartedly useless without knowing what the unit of energy was.
Wholesale prices are usually in local currency per MWh, but yes consumer prices are normally per kWh (and may use a smaller unit of currency if there is one) so that is confusing if like most people you don't normally look at wholesale prices.
For example headlines in the UK green press mentioned a £45 per MWh strike price for new wind turbine. Strike prices are basically a guaranteed wholesale price. But consumer pricing would normally be presented as pence per kWh.
In Canada I had per KWh (same as in most of Europe I think), so yes, I found this completely useless. Maybe they just wanted to say it's over 9000 because of the meme.
You're calling an article 'useless' because you have to open it to know the unit? That's pretty extreme.
Would you be complaining if it was "Texas Power Prices Spike Amid Scorching Heat"? Or "Texas Power Prices Max Out Amid Scorching Heat"? I think both those titles are fine, and they give about the same amount of information.
If you want to say the number inside the headline is useless, I won't argue.
But you were agreeing with a claim that the headline itself was useless. That's not the same thing.
If the headline was useful without the number, which you seem to agree with[1], then the headline is still useful with the number. It's like adding an extra filler word to a sentence. The word is useless, but it doesn't ruin the sentence it's inside of.
[1] Note that the original headline already had qualitative information, and made it clear that this number was unusually high. It's not qualitative vs. quantitative, it's qualitative vs. both.
