Four plates of pasta with tomato, oil and Parmesan.
16 LiFePO4 cells, each rated at 32 ampere-hours and 3.2 volts, connected in series, totalling 51.2 volts and 32 ampere-hours. If you multiply the amperes by the volts, you get 1,638, which is the watts per hour, or 1.63 kWh, to put it simply. How much energy is that?
Well, a joule, or newton-metre, is one watt per second, so rounding it off we have 5.9e+6 joules, or 5.9 megajoules to put it simply. But how much energy is that?
Well, 5,900,000 joules correspond to 3.68049e+25 electronvolts; perhaps we could think of it as 1,409,369 small calories, or 1,409 large calories, like those in pasta. PASTA!
At last, a user-friendly unit of energy. 100 grams of pasta provides around 350 calories. This battery contains the energy equivalent of 400 grams of pasta, or about 300 grams of pasta simply dressed with extra virgin olive oil, tomato and a tiny sprinkling of grated Parmesan. It could also be turned into a margherita pizza; in that case, we’d have a battery containing 400 grams of margherita pizza – a proper pizza! I’m starting to get the picture… We need human-sized measurements now!
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