Talking about real-life examples of gigantic numbers will help your students develop better place value concepts. Our Base 10 counting system operates with 10x, 100x, 1000 x and many more multiples of 10.
Today 1 866 134 284 978 MWh of solar energy reached earth. A megawatt hour is equivalent to 1 million watts of electricity being used for an hour. A megawatt hour (MWh) is equal to 1000 kilowatt hours.
A kilowatt-hour is a measure of the total use of electrical energy over a time period and is equivalent to 1000 watts of power (a kilowatt) being used continuously for 1 hour. A kilowatt is 1000 watts so 1 megawatt is 1 million watts of power.
A gigawatt is 1 billion watts of power meaning almost 2000 gigawatts of solar power reached earth today.
How strange that we don’t focus on solar energy collection more than we do. The world’s largest solar plant opened in China this month – the Huanghe Hydropower Development in China’s remote Qinghai province. Your students might like to research this project and discover lots more about huge numbers in our world.
