Thank you for this example, I see now that the whole electricity property is far more complex than I thought
But at least I now know that a car factory (with all of it's parts) consumes around 14 MW
I THINK that the most energy consuming part for making a car is the production of the raw material for it's parts rather than actually making the parts and assembling them, right?
Right
We don't need to be over accurate here, so I would propose Factories in general should consume around 3 MW (is this roughly correct?).
Roughly yes
So what about the energy consumption of these (roughly)?
- Average Store
Ma&Pa store: about the same as average household: ~10MWhs/year (about 1kW constant consumption)
Supermarket: 50kWh per square foot per year (source:
http://www.energystar.gov/buildings...Flyer for Supermarkets and Grocery Stores.pdf)
Assuming about 80k square feet (a good sized Walmart), it's about 4000MWh/year, or about 0.5 MW constant consumption.
(more when selling electronics)
Mines don't consume much electric energy. Mining machinery mostly runs on oil.
"In 1985, the Bureau of Mines reported that electric power requirements at most taconite operations range between 100 and 150-kilowatt hours per ton of pellets produced." (source:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/mining/pdfs/iron.pdf). At about 20k tons, that's ~0.25 MW constant consumption.
- Average Smelter (I know for example that Aluminium consumes a lot of energy, and that ironsmelter run on coal rather than energy. Do you think it makes any sense that smelters require power at all?)
Some do require energy. Steel mills use electric furnaces to process pig iron. About 500-750 kWh of electricity are consumed per ton of steel. Assuming production of ~300k tons per year (steel mills are usually supplied by many mines), that's ~20MW constant consumption (
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/resources/steel/pdfs/steel_energy_use.pdf). Aluminum plants have OBSCENE energy requirements (big ones have their own 1000+ MW power plants -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Example_aluminium_smelters). So ~500MW constant consumption is a rather conservative estimate for an "average" plant.
- Average Ingots to Product maker (that would be the same as Factory I guess)
Give or take. Depends on production volume, but mostly they're just machining the tools.
- Average Computer Center (yeah, there are order of magnitudes between google and a small companies Intranet, I mean a Network that actually is represented with the building: Computer Network.
About 0.1 MW constantly for an "average" data center. 1MW for a really big one.
If you
want to, you can fill in values for buildings in this google doc:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsZ97EvYjrFzdFdWQnBJUDNSMmR1bzhURlhyd29PLXc#gid=2
Feel free to override what I filled in so far if you think the values are wrong.
I'll take a look at it.
EDIT: OK, I've looked over your list and one thing I noticed is that you assign energy use to a lot of small stores. -Their energy use is on par with family houses, so I wouldn't make them consume any energy at all (or rather have it be a part of the energy consumed by general population).