Back to the Future's 1.21 gigawatts sounds huge, but is it? We compare different power levels of common objects to see how much energy a gigawatt really is.
No, an average nuclear plant outputs 1 GW. That means 1 GWh per hour or 24 GWh per day. Watt is how far you pull the handle for the tap, Wh is how much water comes out in an hour. So lightning is 10 GW, but for less than a second, which means the kwh is maybe in the hundreds somewhere, not anywhere near what a nuclear plant produces in an hour, let alone a day.
But if you need a very short burst of electricity for something, lightning is indeed the best way to do it.
Where are you getting those numbers from? First of all, GW is a unit of power, not energy. You can’t “produce 1.21GW in a day” because it’s a measurement of instantaneous power. Some nuclear reactors produce around 1GW(e), which means 1 gigawatt hour per hour.
Yeah, and the article is wrong, though only slightly. They seem to be confusing watts (power, energy over time) with Joules (energy, power times a duration of time). They give a passable definition in the beginning ("energy transfer"), but they seem to misunderstand what the "transfer" part means exactly.
If you find-replace all instances of "watt" with "watt-hour" after that starting definition, it would be more accurate. That's why I say it's only slightly wrong.
i think they attempted to flatten the complex subject, and even specifically mention that watts isnt exactly correct, but close enough.
if all you need to do is add -hours to the end of watt for the whole thing to be even an approximation, i think the article is fine and all the scientists here are acting pendants.
this is an entertainment piece. not building a bridge here...
Actually, Jiggawatt is gigawatt mispronounced. So they are the same thing. :) There is an article in the NY Times regarding this that when they were doing research, someone mispronounced it to them.
A 100-watt bulb is so named because it uses 100 watts of energy for every hour of operation.
This does not make sense. watt is not a unit of energy.
Neither does this:
We’re still nowhere close to a gigawatt, we’ll need 1,000 megawatts to get there. That’s enough electricity to keep the average American home powered up for 100 years.
For anyone curious energy is the ability to do work and power is how fast that work can be done. Power represented in watts is the relationship of units of energy per unit of time or 1 watt = 1 joule (energy unit or work that can be done) per second.
When I read those things I always assume they're talking about megawatt hours.
Considering that the average american home consumes a little under 1000 kilowatt hours a month then the math starts to line up.
1000 KW hours is 1 megawatt hour. 1,000 megawatt hours is 1 gigawatt hour, so 1,000 months, while being a bit shy of 100 years, is still 83 years and change.
This article clearly has no idea what the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt hours) is. Not sure how they expect to be taken seriously when they can’t even get those straight.
The article does lack any conversion to Olympic swimming pools, bananas, or infinity stones so some of us may never truly grasp the scale of this power.
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