Scientific Illiteracy: “80 Hours of Electricity??”

It pains me to see the horrific level of scientific illiteracy in today’s world.  From Business Insider: Chinese students have figured out how to turn a spoonful of sugar into 80 hours of electricity.

Electricity is not measured in units of time.  That’s like my saying “I weigh 170 minutes,” or “This piece of string is 45 seconds long.”

Now, time multiplied by power = energy, so let’s do the math that (I guess) the author of the article intended:

There are 20 Calories (capital “c” — food calories) in a teaspoon of sugar, which converts to 20,000 calories (lower case “c”, used in physics). Assuming 100% efficiency, that means 23 Watt-hours.  If you want that to stretch over 80 hours, you get 0.29 Watts. If you had about 5000 of these running simultaneously, you could blow-dry your hair.