How Much Power Is 1.21 Gigawatts, Anyway? The Science Behind Back to the Future
How Much Power Is 1.21 Gigawatts, Anyway? The Science Behind Back to the Future
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.
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.
It would have the equivalent power of 1.3 million horses kicking a hole in the fabric of reality.
Finally explained in terms I can understand!
6Americans will use anything to avoid the metric system
6Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.
2
Finally some science to back up the movie!
4Sorry, I still don't get it. How much would that be in Olympic swimming pools?
1The 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.
1
How many gigawatts in a jiggawatt?
5Actually, 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.
0
1.21gw == output of 1 nuke plant for 1 day == power single home for 100 years
avg lightning = 10gw
5Where 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.
4Save the Clock Tower!
21.21gw == output of 1 nuke plant for 1 day == power single home for 100 years
avg lightning = 10gw
Whoa, this is heavy.
2There's that word again. 'Heavy.' Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
2
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.
3For 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.
5When 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.
4
This article is completely wrong.
Watts doesn't have a time factor at all.
Power is measured in W (Watts).
Energy is measured in J (Joule's), or Wh (Watt-hours) where 1 Wh = 3600 J.So 1.21GW is enough power to light 12.1 million 100 W bulbs, if you kept them powered for 1s you would use 1.21GJ of energy, which is 3.36MWh.
I can't believe how badly the article gets it wrong.
I'm an engineer, I work with this stuff regularly.
1Cool.
1It wasn’t gigawatts, though.
0It was though? Doc Brown just says gigawatt with a soft G while we people of the future pronounce it with a hard G.
You would think he'd get it right since he has a time machine and can go find out how people talk in the future.
1