I forgot for a moment where I was going with this, but now back on track: if they wanted to make the two values comparable, Edison's plant should also produce 770 MWh every minute.
> if they wanted to make the two values comparable
When was the last time you saw a journalism piece try to make units comparable?
That number can mean absolutely anything, there is no telling what the people could be thinking on the telephone game from transcribing the source all the way into a finished and edited design.
You are not wrong, and now I'm more confused. Unfortunately the linked report 404s, but an old copy was available through the Wayback Machine (it is exploring market needs wrt. photovoltaic systems in NYC). The introduction states that the city's total electrical consumption in 2015 was 52836 GWh.
Math time: (52836 × 1000 × 1000) / (365 × 24 × 60) = 100525 kWh of energy consumed in a minute. So that checks out.
On the other end of the comparison, by the early 1900s AC largely won and plants were appearing left and right like flowers in a field. I can't find the exact station nor its capabilities just by searching for the 1920 date.
Edison's first commercial station in Pearl Street from 1882 (still DC, I think) had 6 dynamos producing 100 kW of power each: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Street_Station Which is... let's see... 600 kWh every hour! :) Or 10 kWh per minute.
If the author suggests that Edison's plant produced an amount of electricity that is enough to cater for present day NYC's consumption a mere seven times over, that doesn't seem quite right. 770000 kWh in an hour is 12833 kWh per minute, in which case you need to build 10 Edison-plants to match the demand.
(I divided so many numbers in this comment, I sincerely hope that I did them right)
I think the 2015 electric consumption was 10000x of what the 600kW edison plant could generate?
This is a great example of how things get simpler if we drop the over time part of the units and simplify it to just the average power draw.
So in 2015 NYC consumed 52836 GWh. So the average power draw is 52836 GWh / 365 days = 6031510 kW . As in, at any given moment in 2015 NYC was on average pulling 6031510 kW or 6.03 GW.
The edison Pearl Street station could output 600kW. (and that's the theoretical peak of all 6x dynamos, probably less output in practice)
6031510 kW / 600 kW = 10052.5 so I think our current consumption is about 10000x higher not 7x-10x higher than the Pearl St station's output!
Journalist consistently use silly or incorrect units when discussing power usage. At least for this article the units aren't flat out wrong, just silly and I can see how "kilowatt-hours per minute" could be a bit more intuitive to readers.
(And don't get me started on how USB battery manufacturers advertise capacity in obtuse units like 27000 mAh @ 3.7 volts instead of just using 99.9 watt-hours or 27 amp-hours.)
