OOMs aren't just for AI anymore
4 batteries, 4 Orders Of Magnitude: Lessons in scale on the road towards electric intuition
Welcome to My Next Electric, a newsletter about the future of energy and going electric.
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How it all works & what to do about it @ My Next Electric
Today — a re-enactment from My Next Electric Cohort 9’s quest for energy intuition!
Cohort 9 of my free course on the future of energy and electrification is underway! A BIG shout out to everyone making this cohort so much fun.
Let me catch you up on week 1:
The goal — Build intuition about our increasingly electrified world
The strategy
Zoom out and get the picture with a Sankey diagram
Zoom in on the battery we understand best — the one in our phone
Pick a good unit of measure — the kilowatt hour
Pick good music — Electrify. Giggle. Repeat. I’ve got the lyrics at least.
Measure different size batteries to get a feel for a kilowatt hour
Based on great feedback from Team N (Tuesday in New Orleans), I was able to rework things for Team Z the next day (Wednesday via zoom). Hurray for rapid iteration!
The big edit was a rework on how to build intuition about electrifying things in our gas world by studying real-life batteries.
For 15 years, I’ve been building my own intuition about electricity by converting old gas vehicles to run on electricity. Here’s a bike I converted a few years ago with 6 kilowatt hours of battery on it.
Anyway, turns out the batteries I have sitting around my shop are a great way to make electrification more real. So I did a little show and tell of four batteries — each with an order of magnitude more energy inside.
It felt like a good first step towards electric intuition. Here’s a re-enactment…
It’s great to be back at the course with so many clever, curious people. Stay tuned for more on building intuition, together.