Power!!!!!!

nouseferaname90

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It may not be a particularly glamorous definition of the automobile, but it's true on some level that cars and trucks are individual little power generators on wheels, a fact pointed out here by Wired staff writer Alexis Madrigal. Interestingly, when viewed in that light, the United States has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to overall latent power availability.

In fact, Madrigal calculates that the U.S. has 35 times more horsepower sitting there in our driveways than in all our power plants combined. Like numbers? Says Madrigal:
Turns out we have something on the order of 51 billion peak horsepower sitting in our driveways. That's an incredible 38,276 gigawatts of power available. That absolutely dwarfs the nameplate capacity of our electrical power plants, which total up to a mere 1,087 gigawatts. In fact, each week of 2008, a horrible year for car sales, almost 38 gigawatts of capacity rolled into the streets of America.
That's mighty impressive, no? While we're not sure we'd follow the logic all the way to the conclusion that we should all be driving Tata Nanos, we do agree that the average passenger car doesn't really need 200 horsepower to get its lone occupant to work on time. We also can't help but consider the potential of a national electric car infrastructure as a way to store excess power that could be called into action in a jiffy if required.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/08/19/curiosity-report-says-we-have-35x-more-hp-in-our-driveways-than/

What can I say? POWAAAA!!!!
 
We wouldn't need most of that HP if our cars were not so fat.
 
Good thing JC doesn't work in a power plant, don't want to see some cooling towers powersliding through the countryside...


To be fair though, I'm sure they used the electrical output power for the power plants, so you'd have to multiply the power plants' figure by about three. For example, the nuclear plant around the corner produces 3.9GW of (thermic) power, while it's only putting out 1.4GW of (electrical) power.
 
As my friend just said when I showed this to him: "You can cut a good chunk out of the car-power number, for those cars that just stand around in Jay Leno's garage!" :lol:
 
Clarkson's "POWER" always gets to me and makes me laugh.
 
Needs more jigawatts.
 
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