Powering America with Hamsters

Hamster wheels. Power grid. Need I say more?

As the United States works on building a cleaner electric grid, it is clear that the country is in desperate need of a new energy source. Scientists have been working on low-emission technologies such as nuclear fusion and hydrogen power for years, but these are still not ready for deployment on a national scale. I believe that we’ve overlooked a simple solution.

Consider the hamster. At an average weight of only five ounces, these fluffy quadrupeds are deceptively powerful animals that we might be able to harness for electricity production. Hamsters are “highly motivated” to run on wheels — Syrian hamsters are known to run up to six miles in one night. Due to a release of endorphins while running, they experience a “runner’s high”, which allows them to persist despite receiving no external encouragement or validation.

If we connected enough hamster wheels to the electric grid, we could theoretically power a house, a neighborhood, a city, and possibly even all of America. Given that one hamster running on a wheel generates enough power to illuminate a small LED lamp, we can calculate how many hamsters would be needed to power the entire grid. Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Creating a hamster-driven society

Starting at the lowest level, we will first determine how many hamsters we would need to power a house. According to EnergySage, the average American home uses 1,214 watts of power. By comparison, the humble hamster generates only half a watt of power when it runs on a wheel. Assuming we construct a massive array of hamsters and connect them all to a house, we would need almost 2,500 hamsters running at the same time to power it.

It is important to remember that the “1,214 watts” figure is merely an average derived from a house’s annual energy consumption. Appliances such as microwaves, refrigerators, and ovens can use upwards of 1,000 watts alone. This means that the simple act of heating up Cup Noodles in your microwave could cause a blackout due to the power system being suddenly overloaded. At best, this means a tripped circuit breaker. At worst, this could result in a catastrophic house fire.

Disregarding safety concerns, let’s scale up our hamster grid to power a small town. Take Cape May: a charming beach town at the southern tip of New Jersey. Cape May requires about 84 million watts of power to run at any given moment. This translates to a local power grid consisting of over 160 million hamsters running simultaneously for eternity. With a population of almost 3,000 people, there would be roughly 50,000 hamsters for every New Jerseyan living in Cape May.

At this scale, we’re beginning to run into significant problems. Blackouts will become extremely common depending on if the town’s power usage exceeds the power output of our enormous hamster population. We will also have to deal with the question of where to put all of these hamsters — a question which I will revisit later.

No worries, though. If hamster power is good enough for New Jersey, it’s good enough for New York. According to city officials, New York City uses a whopping 5.5 billion watts of power. This means that we would need an incredible 11 billion hamsters connected to the electric grid, which far exceeds the global human population. For the first time in history, sewer rats would lose their status as the city’s most popular rodent. Of course, NYC would experience a blackout almost immediately, but it’s nothing the city hasn’t experienced before.

Moving onto the final phase of the hamster plan, we shall power the entire country with hamsters as promised. The United States continuously uses over 460 billion watts, which converts to almost one trillion hamsters. To put that into perspective, the number of human beings that have ever lived is roughly 117 billion, and that spans over 200,000 years. You would need to repeat human history eight and a half times just to match the absolute behemoth of a hamster power station we’ve assembled.

Problems with using hamsters as a power source

One of the biggest problems with implementing a hamster power grid — aside from actually building it — is figuring out where to put trillions of hamsters. Thankfully, the United States has a lot of space and a relatively low population density. We can use Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas as a blueprint for what our hamster power stations will look like. Constructed for manufacturing Tesla’s electric cars, the Gigafactory is astoundingly large. At ten million square feet, it’s the country’s second-largest factory — perfect for our needs.

We need all of this space because hamsters are solitary animals and they require a large habitation relative to their body size. If you put more than one hamster in a cage at a time, bad things will happen. HamsterWelfare recommends that a cage should be a hundred centimeters by fifty centimeters by fifty centimeters, which is about the size of two checked luggage bags on United Airlines taped together. If we completely covered the Gigafactory’s floor in hamster cages, we could fit almost two million hamsters on one floor. Apparently, you can stack cages, so to house all the hamsters necessary to power America, we would need over half a million layers of cages.

This presents a small problem, because a factory of that height would stretch into space and come close to reaching the orbit of the Space Shuttle.

We can fix this by opening up multiple Hamster Gigafactories. With a more reasonable factory height of a hundred feet, we would need about 9,000 of them to house our hamsters. “But wait!” you say. “Hamsters don’t run forever! Won’t they get tired and stop generating power?”

You’re right. For the entirety of this article, I’ve been assuming that every one of our hamsters is a so-called “superhamster”. In other words, these creatures never sleep and possess infinite stamina. In reality, hamsters will only run for roughly three to four hours per night, so we need to fix this in order to maintain a constant flow of electricity from our Gigafactory. I propose that we implement a shift-based system where each hamster clocks out after running for three hours. For 24-hour service, we would need eight batches of hamsters per day — each wave consisting of one trillion rodents.

To house this many animals, we will need over 70,000 factories. That works out to be about 25,000 square miles, which means that we could cover most of South Carolina in Hamster Gigafactories.

Now that we’ve solved the housing problem, we’ll need to figure out how to keep this many hamsters alive for an extended period of time. Hamsters eat relatively little food, requiring only a tablespoon of pellets and twenty milliliters of water per day. Multiplying by eight trillion, we find a drastically more concerning reality. These creatures would collectively gulp down 160 billion liters of water each day, equivalent to thirteen percent of America’s daily water consumption. They would also eat almost 44 billion metric tons of grain-based pellets every day, which is an issue when you realize that we as a species only produce 2.5 billion metric tons of rice, corn, and wheat each year.

At this point, it’s not even worth puzzling over the logistics of hiring humans to build and maintain thousands of Hamster Gigafactories given that its construction could indirectly cause an extinction-level famine. However, we might as well calculate how much it would cost just to buy this many hamsters. Given that a hamster sells for about ten dollars depending on the market, we would spend $80 trillion alone on acquiring our workforce. Assuming that the American government funds this project, it would plunge the country into absurd amounts of debt  — 70% of which would be a result of the Great Hamster Purchase of 2024.

Since the economy is now in ruins, we probably wouldn’t be able to pay the hamsters a fair wage for their labor. In case the hamsters unionize, the last thing we’ll need to do is hire a team of lawyers to negotiate with them when the time comes.

Special thanks to Izzy Rasmussen for providing illustrations for this article.