Energy is pretty amazing! So amazing that as a species we use around 15 terawatts at
any given moment! That’s equivalent to 15 trillion watts. Consider this average light
bulb which consumes roughly 100 watts. One single terawatt could power 10 billion of
them at the same time.
Of the world’s energy, the US consumes about 25% , while Google alone accounts for roughly
0.013%. This is enough energy to continuously power 200,000 homes
Food also contains energy, which is measured in calories or joules. 1 Food Calorie is equal
to roughly 4200 Joules of energy. So how long would you have to plug yourself into a wall
to get a days worth of food energy? If we take a standard daily diet for a male of around
2500 Food Calories, we find that our bodies need around 10,000,000 Joules of energy each
day. Take something like your laptop, which charges at about 50 Joules per second, and
it would take roughly 55 hours to charge yourself. On the other hand, if we charged at the energy
input of a microwave which is roughly 1,500 Joules per second, it would only take 1.9
hours! Even more amazing is the fact that this much energy would cost roughly 33 cents
in North America. 33 cents for your daily intake of energy! It’s too bad we can’t
just plug in.
But if you took all that energy, how big of an explosion could it make? Well, 1 Food Calorie
is conveniently equal to 1 gram of the explosive TNT. So if you eat 2,500 food calories in
a day, you’re looking at the equivalent of about 44 WW2 hand grenades. That’s a
pretty big explosion!
But it should be no surprise that energy can cause damage; after all we’ve all experienced
an electric shock. But how much electricity does it take to actually kill a human?
Surprisingly little.
7 milliamps, for as little as 3 seconds, to
be exact. This is equivalent to a AAA battery straight to the heart. You see, electricity
actually kills by interrupting the heart rhythm. The reason you don’t see people dying when
they get shocked is that But our body has built in protection, like your skin, so it
doesn’t go straight to your heart. However with something like lightning, all bets are off.
In fact, a lightning bolt can hit over 1 billion volts! The reason some people survive lightning
strikes is based on the path it takes through their body. If the heart goes untouched, you
can come out alive.
Which shows you just how awesome and powerful nature really is. What may surprise you more
is that every minute, enough sunlight reaches the earth’s surface to satisfy the world’s
energy demands—for an entire year. That’s right, roughly 174 petawatts of energy hits
the earth from the sun! Of course the biggest challenge is finding efficient ways to properly
harness this solar power.
And all this energy and heat are a major contributing factor to the creation of wind; sometimes
so powerful that we see things like hurricanes. But not only can wind turbines take advantage
of the wind to create power, scientists have shown how they can, in high enough concentrations,
help prevent hurricanes. Simply put, wind turbines remove some energy from the wind
to generate power. And simulations have shown that,
hypothetically, if you put enough wind turbines together in an at risk region, major
wind disasters could be minimized substantially.
But apart from this, is wind energy actually worth it? Click here to check out our AsapTHOUGHT
video where we explore how exactly wind turbines work, how much energy they actually produce,
and the crazy new technologies that will change our future. I mean, could the whole world
be powered by wind?
We went to the GE Global Research Centre in Germany, a leader in wind energy, to find
out. There’s a link to it in the description below.
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