[late2part]

Now you're just being silly. Yes, I'm sure they enjoy a luxurious transport and it would be more efficient for them to walk or take a rowboat or fly commercial.

But the energy used, carbon emitted, is fairly small for the 1000 or so flights they take relative to the aggregate benefit they're making by buying so much "cleaner" power.

You really ought consider the relative perspective, I don't think their 757 carbon impact compares to the output of a 5MW data center running 24/7.

[CptJamesCook]

A 747 in the air consumes more power than every single home in San Francisco.

"A Boeing 747 jet has an average power consumption of 140 megawatts."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

You can use this link to see San Francisco's power usage in 2015: http://ecdms.energy.ca.gov/elecbycounty.aspx

It was almost exactly 140 megawatts/hour * 24 hours * 365 days.

I highly doubt Google's worldwide data centers use more power than all of SF.

So, not silly!

[douche]

Holy shit, is that really what a 747 draws? That is nuts. I worked for a few summers at a powerplant that put out about 40-50 MW/h, burning wood biomass.

[majewsky]

As a physicist, I'm always surprised how people generally get units right [1], but they shoot themselves in the foot multiple times over when trying to measure power and energy.

MW/h doesn't make any sense. A unit of power would be MW, a unit of energy would be MWh (megawatt times hour, not divided by hour). MW/h would be a power increase over time, which is surely not what the parent means.

[1] Unless they're in the US, Liberia or Myanmar. :)