How many champagne corks popping it would take to power the Times Square Ball that’s dropped on New Year’s Eve? The Ball is a geodesic sphere, 12 feet in diameter, and weighs 11,875 pounds. The Ball is covered with a total of 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles that vary in size, and range in length from 4 ¾ inches to 5 ¾ inches per side. The 100th anniversary of the Times Square Ball drop saw the ball was updated with over 32,000 state-of-the-art LEDs, which made the lit up ball 80% more efficient than it previously had been with halogen bulbs. The end result is that the lit ball now only requires 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy for the New Year’s Eve celebration. Converting that figure to Joules gives a total energy use of 180,000,000 J.
Champagne Cork
The flight of the champagne cork is only a small part of the energy in opening a champagne bottle. A study that looked at the speed of the cork also found that only about 5% of the energy released when a champagne bottle is opened gets transferred to the kinetic energy of the cork. With the remaining energy being converted to the ‘pop’ sound, a small amount of generated heat, and a cloud of gaseous carbon dioxide (CO2) gushing out of the bottle. If the 0.9 J behind the cork is only 5% of the total champagne opening energy, that would mean the total energy associated with the opening of a champagne bottle is about 17.5 J.
Electric Power
So, what does that mean for our ‘power the Times Square Ball by opening champagne bottles’ scheme? If we’re harnessing the energy of just the corks flying out of the bottles (at 0.9 J per cork), then 205,687,545 bottles of champagne will need to be uncorked. Given that 2 million people attended the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration to ring in 2024, that would mean every person in attendance would need to uncork just under 103 bottles of champagne each. BUT– if we instead are able to harness the entire energy from the champagne uncorking (which brings the total energy per bottle to 17.5 J), then only 10,284377 bottles of champagne are required, or just over 5 bottles per attendee of the Times Square celebration. That’s much more doable! In fact, the Guinness World Record for champagne bottles opened in one minute is 10, so all that’s left is for these misguided champagne powered villains to figure out is how to harness all that energy.
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