A quad is a unit of energy equal to (a
short-scale quadrillion)
BTU, 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 manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United States. ...
in discussing world and national energy budgets. The
global primary energy production in 2004 was 446 quad, equivalent to 471 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:
* of gasoline
*
*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 nuclear test
*12.69 tonnes of
uranium-235
Uranium-235 (235U or U-235) is an Isotopes of uranium, 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 ...
(with 83.14 TJ/kg)
*6 s 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)
References
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Units of energy