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How many gigawatts are in a bolt of lightning?
1.21 gigawatts
And while lightning strikes vary in strength, Dr. Brown was right: they can produce 1.21 gigawatts of power. That’s a sobering fact when you consider that lightning is Utah’s second deadliest natural hazard and has been for the last 15 years according to Utah.gov.
How much power is generated by a bolt of lightning?
An average bolt of lightning, striking from cloud to ground, contains roughly one billion (1,000,000,000) joules of energy. This is no small amount, enough to power a 60-watt lightbulb for six months plus a forgotten open door refrigerator for a day.
What is a gigawatt of power?
Gigawatts measure the capacity of large power plants or of many plants. One gigawatt (GW) = 1,000 megawatts = 1 billion watts. In 2012, the total capacity of U.S. electricity generating plants was approximately 1,100 GW [2].
How are gigawatt hours calculated?
Multiply the MWh figure from Step 1 by 8,760, the number of hours in a year. In this example, that would yield 87,600 MWh total annual power production. Divide the annual MWh figure from Step 2 by 1,000 to get GWh. Thus, 87,600 MWh/year equals 87.6 GWh/year.
How many homes can one gigawatt of electricity power?
But, obviously, you have to account for transmission loss and things like that. So probably right around 300,000 homes per gigawatt. O’Reilly: To do the math, 8point3 Energy Partners currently generates enough electricity to power about 200,000 homes, two-thirds of that.
How many watts are in a gigawatt?
To help put this number in perspective, it’s important to know just how big 1 gigawatt is. A watt is a measure of power and there’s 1 billion watts in 1 GW. (And if you wanted to break it down even further, 1 million watts = 1 megawatt (MW) and 1,000 watts = 1 kilowatt (kW).)
How much electricity does the average person use per month?
The US Energy Information Administration says that in 2014, average US home electrical consumption was 911 kWh per month. There are about 725 hours in a month, which means that a typical home burns, on average, about (1000 ÷ 725) = 1.38 KWH on average. A gigawatt is a billion watts.
How much energy does a 1 GW power plant produce?
A baseline 1 gigawatt power plant with an uptime of 88\% (typical for coal plants) will provide 1 GW x 365 x 24 x 0.88 = 7,700 gWh of energy over the year.