"This quantity is not enough to operate hospital generators for more than thirty minutes,” Hamas added
This sounded like an exaggeration to me but it checks out by my calculations (correct me if I am wrong).
This website calculates 300 litres would generate 2.85 MW hours. If what Hamas says is true then the hospital would have to be using 5.7 MW of power.
I compared this with the state of Victoria (pop. 6.7M) Australia where the hospitals in total use 147MW of power. In non-wartime that Gazan hospital probably serves about ten times fewer people, which would be 14.7MW. Admittedly an Australian hospital’s power use is probably more profligate.
Generator fuel consumption tables give an even worse answer, about half of that theoretical value.
Worse as in Hamas are right to call the offer insulting?
300 litres of fuel yields only half the power I calculated?
Tables like https://www.generatorsource.com/Diesel_Fuel_Consumption.aspx suggest that even just a 2.2MW generator would use that fuel up in about 30 minutes.
I feel like there’s a lot of variables here. I am making some assumptions here, but as an example, I don’t think the hospitals in Gaza would have things like multiple MRI’s or CT Scanners that you would find in more developed areas. Those things require a pretty large amount of power. I know a lot of hospitals in undeveloped regions often only have one, sometimes none at all.
I think the only thing that can give some perspective is how big the diesel tanks are at the hospital. How much does 300L fill them? If that’s like a quarter or less of their total capacity, then yea, that’s not enough. But if that fills them by over half, then I kind of get it. You can only deliver so much at a time if you don’t want trucks of fuel parked outside the hospital, which just seems like a bad idea for many reasons.
