I wonder how fast gas pumps are in terms of KW
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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In litres and MJ because SI units make it easy:
Approximately 34 megajoules per litre for petrol/gasoline.
50 litres filling up in 4 minutes = 1.25 litres/second pumping rate.
1.25 litres/second x 34MJ per litre = 42.5 MJ/second.
1 watt = 1 joule per second, so:
An average fill up runs at about 42.5 megawatts.
I feel like it's important to point out how inefficient an ICE engine is at turning that energy into useful movement however. There is a ton of stored energy in fuel, and very little of it is actually converted to useful energy.
The peak of internal combustion efficiency is only about 50% in ideal conditions, in a purpose-built engine. Your everyday commuter in real world conditions is going to be more in the 20% range. And that's likely to drop as it ages and isn't maintained absolutely perfectly.
So while a ton of energy is moving in that fuel up, little of it will ever be used. Especially when compared to an EV's real world efficiency being around 80-85%.
That's not nearly enough to turn a DeLorean into a time machine.
Google says about 10 gallons a minute, and each gallon is about 33KWh. 330KWh in a minute is about 20,000 KW or 20 MW assuming I can do math correctly.
Damn.
super fast until the last 0.50$ then it takes an hour