[aperson_hello]

There's a philosophical discussion to be had here regarding the difference between a gigawatt and a jigawatt!

[airstrike]

Technically "jigowatts" per the script http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/bttf4th.pdf even though they really meant it to be gigawatts

[jokteur]

In the french dub, they say jigowatt.

[bilsbie]

Also could be very little energy depending on how long they needed to apply the power.

[flir]

Well a lightning bolt solved that problem, so...

[bilsbie]

Do you think the flux capacitor played a role in storing the energy?

[p1mrx]

Why store the energy, when you can just send it forward in time?

[bilsbie]

Hmm. Maybe it’s a mini Time Machine that steals energy from the future to power full scale time travel?

Sort of like a time travel boot loader?

[mminer237]

So say 10 gigawatts over 50 microseconds. So you could charge it up in about 3½ minutes from a standard residential outlet.

[danbruc]

Wikipedia says a typical lightning bolt releases 1 GJ, so 10 GW you can have for 100 ms, for 50 µs you can have 20 TW. And most importantly 1.21 GW for the better part of a second, 826 ms to be precise.