Evidently, the old stuff was archived and a new discussion system was put into place.
MattII
08:48:00 PM Mar 6th 2010
Oh, right. Missed that 'archived' button the first time around.
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MattII
topic
08:47:37 PM Mar 6th 2010 edited by MattII
Dammit, double-posted. Anyone know how to delete posts now?
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DragonHawk
topic
08:27:24 PM Mar 17th 2010
1.21 gigawatts in everyday terms
I was curious (and bored and avoiding doing my laundry), so I started doing some back-of-napkin style calculations.
According to Wikipedia, gasoline contains roughly 8.89 kW*h/L (8.89 kilowatt*hours per litre).
Converting hours to seconds (8.89*60*60) yields 32004 kW*s/L.
Converting kilowatts to gigawatts yields 0.032 GW*s/L.
Again according to Wikipedia, the energy conversion efficiency of a combustion engine can vary from 10% to 50%. Let's split the difference and say 30%. That yields 0.0096 GW*s/L.
1.21 / 0.0096 = 126
So, burning 126 litres of gasoline per second in combustion engine(s) would be (very) roughly equivilent to 1.21 gigawatts.
My car gets roughly 30 MPG at a steady highway speed of 60 MPH. Google tells me 30 MPG is 12.75 litre/kilometer. Google tells me 60 miles is roughly 97 kilometers. An hour is 3600 seconds.
So, one hour at that speed (97 km / 12.75 L/km) yields 7.6 L. Per second, that is 0.002 L/s.
(There's probabbly a more direct way to get that result, but I get confused easy when juggling units.)
126 L/s / 0.002 L/s = 63000
So, 1.21 GW is (very very) roughly equivilent to the power output of 63,000 motor vehciles. I think.
More directly: Your typical hand-held hair dryer uses 1800 watts (in the US, anyway). (Why 1800? Because that's the maximum rating for a standard household outlet.) 1.21 GW / 1800 W = 672222. So roughly three-quarters-of-a-million hair dryers.
Of course, as people have nattered about on the main page, without knowing the duration of the usage, just knowing 1.21 GW isn't very useful. Running a 4 watt nightlight lightbulb for a year uses a lot more energy than running my hair dryer for five seconds.