this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
119 points (99.2% liked)
Memes
53340 readers
694 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"GW per year" and "TW per year" is nonsense.
Watts is a unit of power, which is energy per second.
Im not sure Musk even understands what a Watt is, he just wants to sound smart.
So what is a kWh then?
That's watts multiplied by time, aka energy.
So if you can have a kilowatt per hour, then why can't you have a gigawatt per year?
Because it's not kilowatt per hour (kW/h), it's kilowatt hours (kWh). It would be fine to say GW years, but then the question would be over how long? Most likely one year, which gives us GWy/y = GW.
Kilowatt per hour is not energy. It's just power generated per hour. Energy would be kilowatt × hour.
Energy Unit.
A unit of measurement that only makes sense in the context of domestic electricity meters. Supposedly to make it easier for consumers.
Or 3,6 Kilojoule.
As much as I'd like to shit on him, I believe he talks about building energy generation capacity (aka GW or TW) in a certain time period (i.e. one year). Like building 1000 100MW power stations every year, but in space.
Can't tell if it makes any sense economically though, getting anything in scale to space is still kinda very expensive.
And if you try to make whatever you need to get to space light, compact and efficient, it usually quickly becomes very expensive itself.
So "solve other parts of equation" probably means "give me money".
Later edit: if you ever played Factorio, this is equivalent of amount of solar panels crafted and delivered to space platform per hour.
Bro is cooked
Watt is an Energy unit, period, as electrical unit, as in this case, it's W=VA(δ), only as work/kinetic unit it's W = J/s = Nm/s = kgm²*s^-^³
Watt is not a unit of energy, it's a unit of power [Joules/second]. This definition doesn't change between kinetic and electrical contexts.
Well, power measure the rate of energy transfer, anyway Ws is not the same as W.