3 ms·
It would require about 14 MWh to lift a single ship to the upper level Calculating the approximate wattage to lift all that water 26m: 9.8 w/s * 200000000 Lit
by reliablereason 3y ago
It would require about 14 MWh to lift a single ship to the upper level
Calculating the approximate wattage to lift all that water 26m:
9.8 w/s * 200000000 Liters * 26 m /60/60/1000/1000
200 000 000 liters was reported on wikipedia as amount of water used.
Its a very crude calculation probably of by quite a bit.
It's allot of electricity but the cost of that electricity would be essentially nothing when compared to what they charge. So I don't know why they don't install massive pumps. Maybe they don't want to contaminate the lake with salt water, but you would get small amounts of salt water with the current system to.
- celdon25 3y ago> So I don't know why they do what they do. Supply and demand?
- marcosdumay 3y agoAt $200/MWh, that would be around $3k by ship. The energy cost is almost irrelevant on the current supply/demand equilibrium.
- cellis 3y agoCan you break this down for the mere mortal physics minds here? How did you do this calculation??
- Faaak 3y agoSimple E=mgh. m = mass of displaced water h = height of displaced mass g = gravity
- kurthr 3y agoI did it myself, it's about 10MW continuous assuming there are 40 ships each taking about 3000 seconds to traverse the locks. Each lock is ~30x330x10 cubic meters or 1Billion liters (conservatively). A Watt is 1 meter(lift) x 1 Newton / second. There are 30 meters of lift. Each liter is 1kg and gravity (9.8m/sec2) makes that about ~10 Newtons (9.8N due to gravity). So you get 10^9kg x 10N/kg x 30m / 3000 sec = 100MW continuous. That's about 100, 000 horsepower. Each lock would need more than 16MW of pumping. Solar/hydro power from the rain in lake Gatun is well over 100MW. Due to leakage it's probably 5-10x that or equivalent to a larger nuclear power plant.