On the evening of December 24th every year, Santa Claus takes flight to deliver toys to the children of the world. Of course, a lot of preparation goes into this, and, naturally, a lot of power is required to make his workshop run. Except for the few children riding the Polar Express each year, essentially no humans have been to the North Pole to see Santa's workshop. Unfortunately, I haven't made the ride, but I'll go ahead and take my best shot at estimating how much power Santa really needs.
Methodology - Nobody knows exactly how big Santa's workshop is, but we can make some educated guesses to get there.
For starters, UNICEF estimates that there are approximately 2.4 billion children (under 18) in the world. If each child is going to get at least one toy from Santa, and we estimate that elves produce about 1 toy per minute, then we know the following:
Each elf can make 525,600 toys per year (elves don't need to sleep and are very hard workers).
This means Santa must have about 4,567 elves in his workshop.
I imagine each of these elves needs at least 100 square feet to work, making sure they're not right on top of one another. That comes out to 456,700 square feet. Probably safe to round up to 500,000 square feet.
Additionally, the elves need common space to move about-probably just as much as their work space. Let's say another 500,000 square feet.
Storage is tricky, but I'm not too worried about it. Thankfully, Santa has a magic bag that all of the world's presents can be safely stored in without concerns over space.
All in all, with Santa's elves working at a relentless pace, I imagine they still need about 1,000,000 square feet to make Christmas possible. For reference, the empire state building in United States has about 2.7 million square feet of office space.
Lighting and Receptacle Load - The North Pole may not be subject to United States electrical design codes, but it is safe to say that Santa would want to use best practices.
Following Article 220 of the NEC, we can estimate the general lighting load of this workshop at 1.7 VA per square foot. That comes out to 1.7 MVA. It's reasonable to assume these lights are on nonstop to keep those elves safe while making toys.
Each elf will need several receptacles at their workstations to use all of their tools. My guess is that they could be operating up to 4 different devices at a time between their hands and feet (You gotta work smart AND hard to turn out toys every minute). That shakes out to 2 standard receptacles per elf or 9,134 receptacles at the workstations. Although the NEC permits us to use demand factors of 50% beyond the first 10 kVA of receptacle load with each receptacle at 180 VA, we won't be doing that here. Like I said, those are some hardworking elves and it's realistic to assume that they have their tools going all the time. Santa can't afford nuisance tripping at the plant.
To be on the safe side, we'll consider the receptacles to be fully loaded. This means 15A at 120V for each receptacle, or, equivalently, 1.8 kVA per receptacle. All-said, this means that we would have 16.4 MVA for receptacle load. That's huge, but these elves have a lot of work to do and could be using some pretty powerful tools at their workstations!
Heating - It gets pretty cold in the North Pole. We don't have the data exactly where Santa is for obvious reasons, but we can use the northernmost point in the United States for reference. Utqiagvik, Alaska has an extreme annual mean minimum temperature of around -40 Celsius (which also happens to equal to -40 Fahrenheit). That doesn't mean it won't get colder than -40; it just means that on average we expect the yearly low to be -40.
In spite of the cold, I don't think that the workshop will have much in the way of electric heat load. It's more likely that Santa would use the nearby candy cane forest as fuel for his furnace. Polar candy canes are low-carbon fuels, allowing Santa to have no problem meeting his emissions quotas.
Santa's Furnace Fuel
Cookies - In addition to general purpose and heating loads, Santa's workshop most likely has some specialized loads as well. Namely, ovens.
Santa and his elves depend solely on cookies for sustenance year-round. Santa must have a large oven system to feed thousands of people:
Elves are small and don't need to eat much, probably about 10 cookies a day.
That means Santa needs to produce 45,670 cookies per day to feed his team of 4,567 elves.
A typical household oven can turn out 2 dozen cookies approximately every 30 minutes. That means one oven can make 1,152 cookies per day if run around the clock. Santa will need about 40 ovens to support his cookie supply. He likely has more for redundancy, but they don't contribute to the overall load since no more than 40 ovens would be running at a time.
A typical household oven draws around 5 kW for high heat. Based on that estimate, the oven system would only contribute around 200 kW-not bad at all.
The Core Diet of the Workers
Summary - In summary, Santa seems to have the following major loads:
1.7 MVA of lights
16.4 MVA of receptacles
.2 MVA of ovens
I imagine Santa also has a myriad of miscellaneous loads (IT equipment, control systems, small motors, etc.). I'll consider those as another .1 MVA of miscellaneous. That adds up to a grand total of:
16.4 MVA + 1.7 MVA + .2 MVA + .1 MVA = 18.4 MVA
For context, Cowboys Stadium requires up to 10 MW at a time on game days. So, you can think of Santa's workshop as requiring about twice as much power as an NFL stadium. Of course, while a stadium only runs for a small amount of time, Santa's workshop has to be running all the time to make sure that he's ready for Christmas.
Next time you're preparing for the holidays, make sure to think of all the engineering and electrical skills Mr. and Mrs. Claus must be using to make that workshop run!
