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A 747 in the air consumes more power than every single home in San Francisco.

"A Boeing 747 jet has an average power consumption of 140 megawatts."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

You can use this link to see San Francisco's power usage in 2015: http://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx

It was almost exactly 140 megawatts/hour * 24 hours * 365 days.

I highly doubt Google's worldwide data centers use more power than all of SF.

So, not silly!



Holy shit, is that really what a 747 draws? That is nuts. I worked for a few summers at a powerplant that put out about 40-50 MW/h, burning wood biomass.


As a physicist, I'm always surprised how people generally get units right [1], but they shoot themselves in the foot multiple times over when trying to measure power and energy.

MW/h doesn't make any sense. A unit of power would be MW, a unit of energy would be MWh (megawatt times hour, not divided by hour). MW/h would be a power increase over time, which is surely not what the parent means.

[1] Unless they're in the US, Liberia or Myanmar. :)




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