How much is 2 Gigawatts of power?

[Scotius]

Aside of being an avid KSP player, i'm also a fan of comic books. One of my favourite characters can shoot beams of concussive energy (whatever that means:P) out of his eyes - their power apparently peaks at 2 Gigawatts. Obviously, in comic world it is as destructive as writer demands - but what about real world?

2 Gigawatts is power output of a large power plant. If we could pour all this juice into particle accelerator or laser cannon, and shoot something with a coherent beam of energy - how destructive would it be? Enough to punch a hole in a wall? Destroy a house? Obliterate a small mountain? Also, in one book this character was able to propel small asteroid (class B probably) with his energy blasts. Physics of this obviously is as wonky as sci-fi setting allows, but still...engine with 2 Gw output sounds impressive.

Can someone scientifically minded offer an insight on this matter?

[Brotoro]

How long can he keep up this level of power output? Continuously? One millisecond?

[lajoswinkler]

Watt is the unit of power. Power is the amount of work (invested or released energy) over time.

The greater the energy, and the shorter the time is, the more power you get. That means you can have your 2 GW if you do a small amount of work in short enough amount of time.

Think of those huge lasers with unbelieveable powers. The time duration of their pulses is measured in picoseconds.

[Scotius]

How long can he keep up this level of power output? Continuously? One millisecond?

About for a minute or two continuously I know it's "holycrapsomuchpower!!!". And it does not contain any heat component, so no explosive plasmafication of the target - basically it's just "punch". I guess it would be an equivalent of being hit with a projectile shoot from a railgun directly charged by a nuclear power plant.

[Red Iron Crown]

2 Gigawatts for 60 seconds = 120 Gigajoules

About the same energy contained in 20 barrels of oil.

[Scotius]

2 Gigawatts for 60 seconds = 120 Gigajoules

About the same energy contained in 20 barrels of oil.

Whoa there! Are you sure? I dimly remember reading somewhere that Norway private households consume about 2 Gigawatts of power per day. 20 barrels of oil would not be enough to heat and illuminate all the houses in medium-sized country - unless they have insanely efficient electrical systems

[Red Iron Crown]

Whoa there! Are you sure? I dimly remember reading somewhere that Norway private households consume about 2 Gigawatts of power per day. 20 barrels of oil would not be enough to heat and illuminate all the houses in medium-sized country - unless they have insanely efficient electrical systems

Gigawatts per day is meaningless. It's like saying kilometers per hour per day.

As for the barrel of oil, that's from Wikipedia, it says 6 gigajoules of chemical energy in a barrel of oil. Could be wrong. Though I doubt it, gigajoules are the units natural gas is sold in here.

[Guest]

Kilometers per hour per day is a perfectly valid unit. Of acceleration... Gigawatts per day... I dunno. It'd be a unit of power consumption increase. Maybe they meant Gigawatt-days (much like kilowatt-hours, a unit of energy).

[Doozler]

Real life laser weapons seem to be in the tens of kilowatt range

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/13/us_military_laser_truck_destroys_mortars_drones/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2551219/Lockheed-Martin-reveals-portable-LASER-weapon-used-the.html

And a gigawatt is 100,000 times more. So 2 GW would be quite hefty.

[deadshot462]

That's more than enough to power a DeLoean to travel through time. so quite a bit of power there.

[lajoswinkler]

Watt second is an unit of energy. It's joule. Ws=J (W=J/s)

Watt per second would be joule per second per second, or joule per second squared. W/s = J/s/s = J/s^2

I've never encountered such unit. It would be applicable in a scenario where you'd have a machine with a variable power, so you could say that its power is changing over time. "This machine's power is rising at 50 W/s", for example. I don't know if it has any usage.

Strongest laser in the world (https://lasers.llnl.gov) can have a peak power of hundreds of trillions of watts, but the blast lasts on the scale of picoseconds, so the energy is not that insane.

[Doozler]

According to wired (not the most legit, I know) 150 kW would be enough to clean up space junk. Maybe for 0.25...

[Streetwind]

So how much is 2 GW?

Tianhe-2, the current leader of the top500 supercomputer list, consumes 17.81 MW worth of electric power at typical load - or around 0.18 GW. If you had 2 GW worth of power available, you could run 11 identical copies of Tianhe-2 side by side, and still have some power left. That gives you some 372.5 petaflops of Linpack performance. ...Which kind of doesn't really answer the question, as it merely substitutes one abstract large number for another

If you are asking about laser power, keep in mind that a commercial class 4 handheld laser like the Spyder III can output between 0.7 W and 2 W of continuous power, or in other words, 0.000000002 GW. On the lower end of that power band, you will be instantly blinded if you look directly into the laser. And I mean instantly. Before you can even blink, it'll be permanently dark for you. On the upper end, you will suffer permanent eye damage if you as much as switch the laser on without wearing eye protection, as the mere reflection of the laser on a random surface packs enough power to sear out your photoreceptors. Shining the beam onto your skin will burn you severely.

2 GW of laser power is a LOT.

[xcorps]

Gigawatts per day is meaningless. It's like saying kilometers per hour per day.

As for the barrel of oil, that's from Wikipedia, it says 6 gigajoules of chemical energy in a barrel of oil. Could be wrong. Though I doubt it, gigajoules are the units natural gas is sold in here.

The source document for that is a page from Notice 99-18 from the United States Internal Revenue Service, Nonconventional Source Fuel Credit, § 29 Inflation Adjustment Factor, and § 29 Reference Price.

Section 29(d)(5) and (6) provides that the term "barrel-of-oil equivalent" with respect to any fuel generally means that amount of the fuel which has a Btu content of

5.8 million.

Barrel of Oil equivalent is a financial term, not a chemical term. There's a lot more than 6GJ in a bbl of oil if you refine it. Who the hell just burns 42 gallons of crude oil?

[Red Iron Crown]

The source document for that is a page from Notice 99-18 from the United States Internal Revenue Service, Nonconventional Source Fuel Credit, § 29 Inflation Adjustment Factor, and § 29 Reference Price.

Section 29(d)(5) and (6) provides that the term "barrel-of-oil equivalent" with respect to any fuel generally means that amount of the fuel which has a Btu content of

5.8 million.

OK.

Barrel of Oil equivalent is a financial term, not a chemical term. There's a lot more than 6GJ in a bbl of oil if you refine it. Who the hell just burns 42 gallons of crude oil?

How can there be more energy from refining? As I understand it, refining is just splitting the crude into its constituents, a physical process. The sum of the energy of the constituents must be equal to or less than the energy in the crude.

[bsalis]

2 gigawatts isn't that much.

Some trivia - the Saturn V first stage produced in excess of 150 gigawatts. That is 3 times as much as the electrical generation capacity of my country, Australia.

Um, I didn't answer your question. Sorry.

[xcorps]

OK.

How can there be more energy from refining? As I understand it, refining is just splitting the crude into its constituents, a physical process. The sum of the energy of the constituents must be equal to or less than the energy in the crude.

Derp. I was thinking a barrel of gasoline vs a barrel of crude.

[jwenting]

Whoa there! Are you sure? I dimly remember reading somewhere that Norway private households consume about 2 Gigawatts of power per day. 20 barrels of oil would not be enough to heat and illuminate all the houses in medium-sized country - unless they have insanely efficient electrical systems

apart from the already mentioned error in units there, consider that that energy use is NOT what that household uses directly.

It's everything it uses directly and indirectly. And that includes the energy used at the water purification plant handling your sewage, the cannery filling that can of pasta sauce you had for dinner, the energy used by the waterworks to pump the drinking water you flushed down the toilet, and the energy used by your car you used to commute to and from work.

In some countries they also include in it the energy the computer you used at work used, and the light in your office, etc. etc.

In other words it's basically just the entire energy consumption of the country divided by the number of people in the country and then multiplied by the average number per household.

[Seret]

Sometimes comparisons help:

1GW = 2 billion watts

Average metabolic output of a human body: 100 watts.

Boiling a kettle for a cup of tea: about 2000 watts (2kW)

Power output of a family car: about 80,000 watts (80kW)

Power output of a formula 1 car:about 450,000 watts (450kW)

Propulsion system on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier: 190MW

Average electricity demand of the whole UK: about 40GW

So a single source at 2GW is pretty epic power output. Especially if it was able to maintain that for several minutes. Only the very largest thermal power stations are able to maintain that kind of output continuously, and they're BIG machines. Where would all this power be coming from? And even if whatever mechanism they were using to convert input to output was 99% efficient (which is astonishingly good) they'd still be having to shed 20MW of heat. Which is 200,000 times the heat your body normally has to get rid of. Your fictional superhero would need some badass sweat glands...

Edited April 5, 2014 by Seret

[Scotius]

Generally his body doesn't create this energy. His power open transdimensional apertures in his eyes - they connect to a sub-dimension filled with virtually unlimited amounts of energy. Even recoil from the blasts doesn't affect hero's body - it gets channeled straight back to the source dimension. It's quite elaborate setup IMHO, even if physically impossible.

[Yourself]

2 GW is approximately the amount of power delivered by sunlight to 2 km² of the Earth's surface (at noon near the equator). So if you want to imagine what something like a laser would do, imagine a 2 km² magnifying glass focusing sunlight into a relatively small area.

[TinfoilChef]

That's more than enough to power a DeLoean to travel through time. so quite a bit of power there.

enough for 1.6528925619834710743801652892562 trips through time @ 1.21 gigawatts per trip

[aNewHope]

1 Joule or 1 watt for 1 second (call it wattsecond / ws) is the energy required to raise 100 gram of mass 1 meter

(E_height = m * g *h) (m = E/[g * h])

Therefore 2 GW over 2 minutes are 240GWs or enough energy to lift 24000 tons 1 km.

Or if you want kinetic energy: (E_kinetic = 1/2 * m * v^2), (v^2 = [2*E] /m)

It is enough to accelerate a car (about 1 ton) to 20.5 km/s, which is almost the double of earths escape velocity.

That's a huge amount of energy and yes, if pointed at a (KSP-)b-class asteroid it would be totally sufficient to push it pretty much anywhere you want it to be.

Edited April 5, 2014 by aNewHope

[Scotius]

Thank you, kind sir That's the kind of answer i was looking for - some sort of reference frame.

[Camacha]

Has anyone given the obvious answer of 15.492.568,96 bananas yet?