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2 hours agoI went on a bit of a dive trying to find this out. Listening to Lemmy you’d believe a single text query burns 1,000 trees.
The “microwave for an hour” line comes from this article. It attributes it to Sasha Luccioni/Code Carbon, which monitored the power usage of a computer while it created a video with “CogVideoX” (not Sora).
So OP isn’t exactly right but unfortunately we don’t have much better to go off. I’m inclined to believe Sora would be much better than that. A surprising amount of news articles all eventually lead back to Sasha Luccioni.
You’re confusing Watts (power) with Watt-hours (energy). A Watt is a Joule per second. A Watt-hour is the amount of energy you’d use if you used 1 Watt for an hour i.e. 3600 Joules.
Microwaves use around 1000 watts. If you ran a microwave for an hour, it would use 1000 Watt-hours (aka 1 kilowatt-hour (kWh))