Accepted Answer
The more I have worked on this, the stranger it has become.First ... I didn't know what 'QBTU' means. But I see that you called it ' 10¹⁵ ' so I guess it's 'quadrillion'.Next ... your given data says 29 million people in the US, and that's ridiculous. Right now it's about 319 million. It was 290 million in 2002, and I see that you used 291 million, so that looks like it was a typo. No problem.Now . . . I did it 3 or 4 times using that 3.412 BTU/hr = 1 watt . I did get the significant figures of 152, but I kept getting either 152 HP or 0.152 HP.At this point, I traced through your solution ... thank you very much for posting it ... and I'm going to take your colossal load of points for saying that I I did go through every step in detail, I agree 100% with everything I see there, and I endorse every move you made. So up to now, we both agree that we cannot see where 1.5 HP/person comes from.I looked back to the conversion factors, and I saw something that could make the arithmetic less complex: 1 BTU = 1,055 JoulesLook what I can do with that: (98.3 x 10¹⁵ BTU/yr) x (1,055 joule/BTU) x (yr/365 day) x (day/86,400sec) x (HP/746 joule-sec) = 4.4082 x 10⁹ HPthen . . .(4.4082 x 10⁹ HP) / (29.1 x 10⁷ people) = 15.15 HP/personI'd say that your work, using the given data, has been vindicated by an outside, independent consultant. It may not be a true statistic, but your math is bullet-proof, and the data have been properly implemented.
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