Just gives you a sense of the absolutely stupid level of energy involved in getting Saturn V off the ground.
Here's some interesting comparisons, if one can believe Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)
2.074 GW – tech: peak power generation of Hoover Dam
8.21 GW – tech: capacity of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant, the world's largest nuclear power plant.[15][16]
11.7 GW – tech: power produced by the Space Shuttle in liftoff configuration (9.875 GW from the SRBs; 1.9875 GW from the SSMEs.)[17]
12.7 GW – geo: average electrical power consumption of Norway in 1998
55 GW – tech: peak daily electrical power consumption of Great Britain in November 2008.[18]
101.6 GW – tech: peak electrical power consumption of France (February 8, 2012 at 7:00 pm)
190 GW – tech: average power consumption of the first stage of the Saturn V rocket
700 GW – biomed: humankind basal metabolic rate as of 2013 (7 billion people).
Five Saturn-V F-1 engines generated almost twice as much power as the peak electrical usage in the entire country of France! Notice how wimpy the Space Shuttle was by comparison, lifting off at only 1/16 the power of the Saturn-V.
I saw this chart the other day, which shows the relative sizes of all manned space vehicles to date:
The size of Skylab compared with the International Space Station is interesting when you subtract the solar arrays and trusses. Skylab's pressurized volume was 320 cubic meters, whereas the ISS is 916 cubic meters pressurized with only 388 cubic meters habitable. The ISS went up in multiple pieces via Russian rockets and Space Shuttle cargo bay loads, whereas Skylab was chucked into orbit in one piece by one Saturn-V.....