Berkeley Laser Fires Pulses Hundreds of Times More Powerful Than All the World’s Electric Plants Combined

Blink and you’ll miss it. Don’t blink, and you’ll still miss it.

Imagine a device capable of delivering more power than all of the world’s electric plants. But this is not a prop for the next James Bond movie. A new laser at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was put through its paces July 20, delivering pulses with a petawatt of power once per second. A petawatt is 10¹⁵ watts, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts—about 400 times as much as the combined instantaneous output of all the world’s electric plants.