A quad is a unit of energy equal to (a
short-scale quadrillion
Depending on context (e.g. language, culture, region), some large numbers have names that allow for describing large quantities in a textual form; not mathematical. For very large values, the text is generally shorter than a decimal numeric repres ...
)
BTU
The British thermal unit (Btu) is a measure of heat, which is a form of energy. It was originally defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It is also part of the United Stat ...
, or (1.055 exajoules or EJ) in
SI units.
The unit is used by the
U.S. Department of Energy
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and energy production, the research and development of nuclear power, the military's nuclear we ...
in discussing world and national energy budgets. The
global primary energy production in 2022 was 637.8 quad, i.e., 672.9 EJ.
Conversion
Some common types of an
energy carrier
An energy carrier is a substance (fuel) or sometimes a phenomenon (energy system) that contains energy that can be later converted to other forms such as mechanical work or heat or to operate chemical or physical processes.
Such carriers inclu ...
approximately equal to 1 quad are:
*8,007,000,000
gallons (US)
The gallon is a unit of measurement, unit of volume in British imperial units and United States customary units.
The imperial gallon (imp gal) is defined as , and is or was used in the United Kingdom and its former colonies, including Ireland ...
of gasoline
*293,071,000,000
kWh
*293.07 terawatt-hours (TWh)
*33.434 gigawatt-years (GWy)
*36,000,000 tonnes of coal
*970,434,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas
*5,996,000,000 UK gallons of diesel oil
*25,200,000 tonnes of oil
*252,000,000 tonnes of TNT or five times the energy of the
Tsar Bomba
The Tsar Bomba (code name: ''Ivan'' or ''Vanya''), also known by the alphanumerical designation "AN602", was a Thermonuclear weapon, thermonuclear aerial bomb, and by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. The Soviet phy ...
nuclear test
*12.69 tonnes of
uranium-235
Uranium-235 ( or U-235) is an isotope of uranium making up about 0.72% of natural uranium. Unlike the predominant isotope uranium-238, it is fissile, i.e., it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction. It is the only fissile isotope that exists in nat ...
(with 83.14 TJ/kg)
*6 seconds of sunlight reaching Earth
See also
*
Units of energy
Energy is defined via work, so the SI unit of energy is the same as the unit of work – the joule (J), named in honour of James Prescott Joule and his experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat. In slightly more fundamental terms, ...
*
Orders of magnitude (energy)
This list compares various energy, energies in joules (J), organized by order of magnitude.
Below 1 J
1 to 105 J
106 to 1011 J
1012 to 1017 J
1018 to 1023 J
Over 1024 J
SI multiples
See also
* Conversion of unit ...
References
Units of energy
{{measurement-stub