One of Tesla’s Many Dreams
At a certain point in his life, Nikola Tesla thought about powering the world with Niagara Falls. Let’s do some rough math on that.
Every second, 3200 tons of water falls 167 feet. Power = energy / unit of time = (mass * gravitation acceleration * height) / time. Since we want this in Watts, we need to convert everything to the metric system, where we get 1.5 * 109 Watts or 1.5 GW. At a certain point in history, somewhere in the late 1880s, Tesla’s concept would have been achievable. Now, we’re at 15 TW (terawatts), meaning that we’d need 10,000 Niagara Falls to get the job done.
