Comment by pintxo
1 day ago
European units (`Energy/100km`) work nicely here, lots of EVs are around `20 kWh/100km`, and most residential housing around here consumes less than `20kWh/day`, actually averaging `20kWh/day` would probably cover a well insulated house including heating (heatpump).
Yes, driving, compared to living, uses ridiculous amounts of energy.
With dimensional analysis you can cancel it all the way out until it's just Newtons, which is actually just the average drag force times some efficiency multiplier.
Dimensional analysis is a superpower honestly. Even in a software engineering career it's saved me from massive issues quite routinely
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/3038/
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The HP 48G / 50G provides incredible unit handling. My main use for it these days.
Any war stories?
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I'm curious if you can elaborate further? Would that make the comparison clearer, or is it just a side-note on your part?
Work (energy) is force times distance. Since we're talking about energy divided by distance, it's actually just average force.
Actually newtons are just a constant factor (3.6) compared to Wh per km, since there are 3600 seconds in a hour while there are 1000 watts in a kilowatt. For example 144 Wh/km (or 14.4 kWh/100 km) would simply be 518 N. This also means that pushing along a Tesla on the highway at constant speed is roughly as hard as holding a 50 kg weight, giving you an intuitive sense of how "hard" it is to keep things moving.
Of course, in everyday life, since we buy electricity from our utilities in kWh rather than joules, it's more convenient to talk about kWh per km (or per mile).
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