Boy do I get frustrated when using compatible units without conversion. The unit that I hate more than any other unit in the universe is the KwH, which is dimensionally equivalent to the Joule, so I don't understand why we don't just use that instead.
"The typical house in the U.S. has 100 amp service or about 28 horsepower" -- seems that it would be way more interesting to say that "the typical house has 100 amp service at 120V, which means 12,000 J/s".
The way the original quote is phrased (and the introduction of horsepower of all things) seems insane to me; the clarification adds zero value. You still haven't addressed the main question, which is "is the energy in a lightning bolt a significant amount of energy compared to household usage". For all I know 28 horsepower is 1,000,000 J/s, so a lightning bolt would only power a house for a second.
EDIT: as many commenters have pointed out, apparently most houses get 240V service, so just double the number above. Still, this is easily fixable, and the main point is that horsepower does not add any value to this discussion.
Strictly speaking, 240V. Normal electric service in North America is 240V split-phase, with the distribution transformer's center tap grounded and serving as the neutral line. We normally only use the full 240V for heavy loads like electric ovens, arc welders, large air conditioners, and such.
Large buildings often use 208V three-phase power, yielding 120V phase-to-neutral, and large commercial lighting installations are often 277V taken from one leg of a 480V three-phase feed. Voltages greater than 240 are not permitted in residential service, and I wouldn't be surprised if phase-to-neutral > 120 is out as well for homes.
Are you running a 100W load (0.1kW) for an hour? That's 0.1kWh. Running it for ten would make a whole kilowatt hour.
This allows for easy calculations of how much something is going to cost in electricity, and the units are such that it's easy to do the math in your head.
In the end there's no practical utility to this. We just pretend that we're living in a world where you get a 100W light bulb and know exactly what it will cost you, and not a world where half your bulbs claim to be 100W but are actually 14W with 100W-incandescent-equivalent and such.
Can we wire that in a way to would allow installing .uk or .de Schuko Type-F plugs?
It would be funny (and weird!) to have 220V available on a european socket for say a desktop equipped with a 1.5kW PSU for the upcoming Nvidia 4090 :)
It's still rare enough you have to ask ahead of time if you want it for any building you get into, but in some major metro areas it has gone from "you have got to be joking" to "sure, let me check on that".
Now if only I can find a reliable, durable three-phase solar inverter...
kWh/yr is worse. It's just watts but obfuscated. Gets used for appliances.
Horsepower is clearly insane though, I have no idea why you'd bother.
Regardless, head-math or otherwise, the vast majority of people will never do this calculation at all, except maybe to weigh the relative power consumption. And if they do the math, having a calculator and having all the units be compatible with each other (so just a natural conversion of W to J/s) is totally fine.
As far as I can see, nowhere in the article does it give enough information (even if you take into account unit conversions) to say how much of a house's electricity would be supplied by a lightning bolt.
Example: a 100 amp house circuit running maxed out in the US will use 12 kWh per hour, or 0.2 per minute. Try doing it in your head with joules. Annoying right?
12 kWh / h? Am I a crazy person? No. I'm working on a useful problem.
> "On an ordinary day over flat desert country, or over the sea, as one goes upward from the surface of the ground the electric potential increases by about 100 volts per meter. Thus there is a vertical electric field E of 100 volts/m in the air. The sign of the field corresponds to a negative charge on the earth’s surface. This means that outdoors the potential at the height of your nose is 200 volts higher than the potential at your feet! You might ask: “Why don’t we just stick a pair of electrodes out in the air one meter apart and use the 100 volts to power our electric lights?”
> "Although the electric current-density in the air is only a few micromicroamperes per square meter, there are very many square meters on the earth’s surface. The total electric current reaching the earth’s surface at any time is very nearly constant at 1800 amperes. This current, of course, is “positive”—it carries plus charges to the earth. So we have a voltage supply of 400,000 volts with a current of 1800 amperes—a power of 700 megawatts! With such a large current coming down, the negative charge on the earth should soon be discharged. In fact, it should take only about half an hour to discharge the entire earth. But the atmospheric electric field has already lasted more than a half-hour since its discovery. How is it maintained? What maintains the voltage? And between what and the earth? There are many questions."
Now you need a double helping of luck - first that you get struck by lightning, and second that your miner guesses the right hash to make a block. But maybe the two somehow combine? After all, people who survive a lightning strike are said to be so lucky that they should buy a lottery ticket... so following this logic, lightning powered mining would be extra efficient!
Now I'm off to patent my new PoS invention - proof of strike :)
Otherwise, unless you know tens of thousands of people there is very little chance of knowing multiple people who have been struck by lightning.
But liters is a unit of volume (length x length x length) and kilometers is a unit of distance (length). Hence, this efficiency metric is equivalent to L^3/L or just L^2. That is, the unit of vehicle fuel efficiency is a measure of area!
The area of what, you ask?
If you made the contents of your tank into a long thin stream of fuel as your vehicle moved along, then its cross section is the instantaneous fuel usage. You can imagine your car driving along, "sucking up" this long thin streamer of fuel as it moves.[1] The thicker this line of fuel, to more it needs for the same distance.
My car gets about 7L/100km, which works out[2] to just 0.07 mm^2, which is surprisingly thin!
[1] I can't take credit for this concept, I got it from XKCD's What If section: https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=7+L+%2F+100+km+in+mm%5E...
Perhaps the 'nickel of electricity' is what's remaining in electrical energy after all the rest has been used up as light, heat and sound across the sky?
Things like laptops and some desktops could be easily powered by bicycle, though. I managed 220W for 30 mins, and could probably idle 50-75W for hours, which is more than enough for multiple laptops.
Some city noticed changes in consumption when new houses had meter installed on ground floor rather than in the basement.
They're advertised as saving energy which I think is a bit misleading as it's only based on this phenomena
Note that these are very generous estimates, but it does demonstrate how silly the idea of trying to generate electricity by capturing exercise output is (in a purely economic sense).
Even if you don't generate much, at least your biomechanical efforts are used somewhere.
Solar, wind, hydro, biofuel, geothermal, maybe even day-night temperature cycles - all of these look much more promising in the "free" energy department. Actually it's hard to think about a worse energy source. Earthquakes maybe? :-)
Let's be generous and give it 1 millisecond. 1 millisecond times 1 gigawatt is 1 million joules, which is the estimate that the article gives.
That is why you have to hit the cable at a very specific time. It's not that hard.
For example the flash you have/had on standard camera (not smartphone who have LEDs, but the standard compact camera that is just a camera) is about 1kW!!
But this 1kW you have it for about 1ms (milisecond!!). It seems to last longer because the light gets “burned” into your eye.
Eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvesting_lightning_energy#:~...).
That might be "easier" in some aspects
And yes, power is what fries the tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_heating
