energy — Special Report
Where Does All the Energy Go?
Calories, kilowatt-hours, and joules — measured in Big Macs, batteries, and nuclear plants
Energy is the most abstract measurement we deal with every day. Calories go in, work comes out — but the conversion rate is maddeningly unclear. You burn roughly 100 calories per mile walked. A Big Mac is 550 calories. So a Big Mac costs you five and a half miles of walking, which takes about an hour and forty-five minutes, during which you will think about the Big Mac the entire time.
The calorie, technically, is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius. The food calorie (technically a kilocalorie) is 1,000 of those. The watt-hour is 3,600 joules. The kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million joules, or about 860 food calories — so a Tesla Powerwall's 13,500 watt-hour capacity could theoretically fuel 22,500 miles of walking. Your own personal Powerwall runs on cheeseburgers.
“A Big Mac contains 550 calories. A Tesla Powerwall stores 13,500 watt-hours. You are more similar than you think.”
At larger scales: a nuclear power plant produces about 1 gigawatt continuously, which is one billion watts, which is the equivalent of 860 million Big Macs per hour. If that number seems large, that's because civilization requires an incomprehensible amount of energy to keep the lights on, the servers running, and the Starbucks machines heating milk to exactly the right temperature.
The sun, for context, produces 3.8 × 10²⁶ watts. That's 380 septillion watts. Our entire electrical grid is a rounding error against a rounding error against the sun. The scale is not useful to dwell on. We dwell on it anyway.
Our energy database has 10 verified energy values, from single Oreos to grid-scale storage. All figures sourced from manufacturer specs, USDA nutrition databases, and the Department of Energy.