[Orcnet] expressing wide power range

[Tim Wescott]

"Billyuns and billyuns?"

I wouldn't even attempt to describe the difference between power and 
energy.  I like your watch battery vs. nuclear power plant, though.  For 
folks who don't understand what a trillion is, the best you can do is 
get across the idea of "really, really big".

Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> I will be presenting Server Sky to the eComm conference next month.
> I have 10 minutes, so I must use memorable and quickly absorbed
> images and themes accessable to a mostly non-technical audience.
>
> Non-technical brains understand ratios countable on fingers,
> confuse power and energy, and parrot statements about trillions
> of kilowatt hours per year, showing that they plainly don't know
> how to calculate with such ridiculous units.
>
> One difficult idea to express is the ratios of the power used by
> world civilization (about 14 Terawatts), the power captured by all
> plant life to make biomass (about 100 Terawatts) and the power
> produced by the sun (380 trillion Terawatts).  Those are a heck
> of a lot of orders of magnitude.  I want to make the point that
> focusing on a few megawatts here or there will not achieve nearly
> as much as solar-system-scale access to the sun.
>
> One possible analogy in that range is the power of a digital watch
> ( about 1.5V x 1uA ) or a hearing aid ( 1.5V x 1mA ) to the thermal
> power of a nuclear power plant ( about 3.3GW thermal to make 1.1 GW
> electric ).   I can express that visually with a few pictures and
> some animation (such as microbes battling over picowatts on the top
> of a watch battery).
>
> I could also make a surface area analogy ( comparing the space taken
> up by an auditorium seat to the land area of the earth ), but given
> that many people think solar farms the size of California are a good
> idea shows that they don't understand large surface areas.
>
> Keith
>
>   


-- 
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
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