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by rzzzt
1185 days ago
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You are not wrong, and now I'm more confused. Unfortunately the linked report 404s, but an old copy was available through the Wayback Machine (it is exploring market needs wrt. photovoltaic systems in NYC). The introduction states that the city's total electrical consumption in 2015 was 52836 GWh. Math time: (52836 × 1000 × 1000) / (365 × 24 × 60) = 100525 kWh of energy consumed in a minute. So that checks out. On the other end of the comparison, by the early 1900s AC largely won and plants were appearing left and right like flowers in a field. I can't find the exact station nor its capabilities just by searching for the 1920 date. Edison's first commercial station in Pearl Street from 1882 (still DC, I think) had 6 dynamos producing 100 kW of power each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Street_Station Which is... let's see... 600 kWh every hour! :) Or 10 kWh per minute. If the author suggests that Edison's plant produced an amount of electricity that is enough to cater for present day NYC's consumption a mere seven times over, that doesn't seem quite right. 770000 kWh in an hour is 12833 kWh per minute, in which case you need to build 10 Edison-plants to match the demand. (I divided so many numbers in this comment, I sincerely hope that I did them right) |
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This is a great example of how things get simpler if we drop the over time part of the units and simplify it to just the average power draw.
So in 2015 NYC consumed 52836 GWh. So the average power draw is 52836 GWh / 365 days = 6031510 kW . As in, at any given moment in 2015 NYC was on average pulling 6031510 kW or 6.03 GW.
The edison Pearl Street station could output 600kW. (and that's the theoretical peak of all 6x dynamos, probably less output in practice)
6031510 kW / 600 kW = 10052.5 so I think our current consumption is about 10000x higher not 7x-10x higher than the Pearl St station's output!