[Skybird]

About wombats.
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There was once this Woody Allen movie about everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask. I'm sure you've cleared up all your questions on the subject by now. However, I strongly suspect that you are highly naive in another area - and you know exactly what I'm talking about.

It is here and now about this problem of mega-giga-tera-watts or watt-hours, which even overtaxes the cognitive abilities of our top-class personnel in politics and media. I will now answer all your questions about this, without taboos and in simple language.



Moving things

If we want to move things in everyday life - repair the car or go on a trip - then we need money to do it; we can't do it without it. That's the driving force behind all the changes we want to make. Even in the technical-physical world, all changes need such a magical force, without which nothing works.

It's called energy, and it can come in different forms - motion, heat, radiation, electricity, etc. These different "currencies" of energy can also be exchanged for each other, but not always without losses.

A particularly pleasant form of energy is electricity. It can be easily transported and transformed into the other forms of energy without any losses. It can be used to heat the water for your morning coffee, run a Tesla car, light a Christmas tree or make a computer calculate. And as with money, we need different amounts of this magical power for different applications.



The wombat in action

Morning coffee water requires less energy than the ICE train on the journey from Munich to Frankfurt. And just as we have defined units for the quantity of money, for example the Euro (Eu) or the Wumms (Wu), we also need a unit to describe quantities of energy. Temporarily, I would like to give this unit the name "Wombat (Wb)", in reference to the Wumms. I try to use simple language here

For the morning coffee, about one tenth of a Wombat = 0.1 Wb is consumed. Together with the refrigerator, heater, and other helpful appliances in the house, we draw something like 350 Wb from the various outlets each month; this figure may vary somewhat from household to household.

For each Wombat, we pay the manufacturer a certain price, say around 0.30 euros.


An unfortunate name

Now, it can be interesting to know how many Wombats come out of the socket at each moment, just as it is interesting to know how much distance we cover each moment when driving a car. We call this the "speed" and measure it in kilometers per hour (km/h), even if we are not driving for a whole hour. Correspondingly, we measure the instantaneous energy consumption in wombats per hour (Wb/h), and call that "power".

As the devil would have it, the engineers have come up with their own name for the "wombats per hour", namely the "kilowatt" = 1000 "watts" . But for the wombat itself there is still no name. One helped oneself now with it, by saying, a Wombat is the quantity of energy, if one hour long the achievement of a kilowatt from the plug socket flowed. And then one gave the poor animal the name kilowatt times hour, or briefly "kilowatt hour".

So:

Power: 1 wombat per hour = 1 kilowatt.

Or 1 Wb/h = 1 kW

and

Energy: 1 wombat = 1 wombat/hour x 1 hour = 1 kilowatt x 1 hour

Or 1 Wb = 1 kWh



Is it because of the big numbers?

Those who deal with the matter professionally have either understood the correlations over time or have at least become accustomed to them. However, the more "energy", or rather "energy problems", determine everyday life and politics, the more frequently misunderstandings occur.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the issue often involves very large numbers. If you want to know how many wombats = kWh all German households consume in a year, for example, you have to multiply the average monthly consumption by 12 and then by 40 million, i.e.

350 kWh x 12 x 40 000 000 = 168 000 000 kWh = 168 000 000 MWh = 168 000 GWh =168 TWh

The prefixes k = kilo = thousand, M = mega = 1 million, G = giga = 1 billion, T = tera = 1 trillion make it easier to write the big numbers.

How many nuclear power plants would we need to supply all these households? To do this, we calculate the power needed, which is wombats per hour = kilowatts, which is the total annual energy consumption divided by the 8766 hours of the year:

168 000 000 kWh / 8766 h = 19 160 000 kW = 19 160 MW = 19 GW.

A nuclear reactor emits something like 1.2 gigawatts (GW), so you would need 19 GW / 1.2 GW ≅16 reactors. There were already that many in Germany at one time. What there weren't back then were electricity problems and fear of freezing and blackout. But we're saving the planet today.

https://think-again.org/was-sie-scho...issen-wollten/