Can someone explain me the concept of MegaWatt?

Question

I'm a bit confused with the concept of electricity, and hopefully someone could clear my mind.

If a Utility Company has a capacity of 1 mW, what does it mean? Does it mean that it creates 1 mW per second? if so, does it mean it creates 9,600 mW-h?

Also, what does it mean if they charge you per megawatt-hour?

Answer 1

Wattage is the "rate" of energy production or consumption. It is kind of like a speed or velocity. A 100 Watt lightbulb will consume 100 watts when switched on. This is kind of like driving in your car at 100 km/hr, i.e. it is a rate of consumption, not a quantity of consumption. To get a quantity of consumption, you have to multiply by another factor, such as time. Thus, a kilowatt hour is a 1,000 Watt bulb burning for one hour, or 10 100 Watt bulbs burning for one hour, or one 100 Watt bulb burning for ten hours, etc. By the way, a megawatt is simply 1,000,000 Watts. I hope this helps.

Answer 2

A watt is a unit of power (a current of 1 amp with a voltage of 1 volt is 1 watt). A million watts is a megawatt or a 1000 kilowatts.
A capacity of 1 megawatt means that every hour it can generate 1 megawatt hour.

That is a small power plant for a utility company. It would power 100 typical houses. Typically a plant would be 100 times bigger for a base load (runs all the time) plant.

Answer 3

Sir Readalot is correct.

A megawatt is one million watts.

Power is sold in kilowatts/hour. Watts = voltage X amperage.
In the US that means 120 x how much amps are used.

To run a 60 watt bulb for 1 hour takes 0.01 kilowatts, your power company could charge you something like 8 cents a kilowatt hour. So your bulb would cost you $0.0008/ hour to run.

Of course you don't just have one light bulb running in your house. You have a whole lot more and that's why the power bills are getting so big. More and more of our tools and appliances are electric so we are using more and more electrical power and we often burn fossil fuels to generate it; coal, gas or oil. Dumping all this excess carbon dioxide into the air is what is creating global warming.

Power plants don't store power; they make it to suit the demand. Battery technology is not the greatest and power consumption in the US has always been high enough that there is never any waste power. A 1 mega-watt power plant is running 100 kilowatts per hour, which isn't a lot of power when you consider the average household.

If your TV uses 60 watts, your house lights use 60 watts to 120 watts for the halogen bulbs, your computer uses up to 800 watts and your refrigerator, heater and Air Conditioner use a whole lot more. So the power usage mounts up fast. If the US were to continue using power at its current rate and the rest of the world tried to catch up then we would need more than 4 earths to supply the fuel to meet the demand.

This is why it is critical to explore alternate fuels and power sources like solar, wind, tidal and alternate fuels. Most power plants in the US burn coal, we have pretty much maximized the amount of power we can get out of dams and China is working on a dam four times the size of the Hoover Dam. They are working hard to become an industrialized superpower and are not taking as much care of the environment as the US does. It has become a concern for the Olympics. In response China plans on taking all their cars off the road in Beijing, and they are moving a lot of their polluting coal power plants.

Answer 4

A megawatt is one million watts, or enough power to light 10,000 one-hundred watt light bulbs.

Wattage is load-carrying capacity at a given instant. A load of one megawatt for one second would be a million watt-seconds. Wattage per time is a measure of power, rather than load carrying capacity, and that is how power companies charge for their product.

The measure is usually by the hour. 9,600 megawatt-hours would mean carrying a load of 9 billion 600 million watts for one hour or one million watts for 9600 hours, or some combination.

For lots more information, including pictures and diagrams, try an internet search on "electric power distribution."

Answer 5

A megawatt is a million watts. A watt is the power necessary to generate one joule of energy per second.

Answer 6

A watt is a measure of power. Power is simply "energy per time"; a rate.

1 joule per second = 1 watt

If your utility company is rated at 1 megawatt (1 MW), it means they can generate 1,000,000 joules per second.

A watt-hour is a measure of energy:

1 watt-hour = 1 watt * 1 hour
1 watt-hour = 1 joule per second * 3600 seconds
1 watt-hour = 3600 joules

Answer 7

The Watt is used to measure power. Power is the rate at which work is performed. Work is a force times a distance. Energy is the capacity to do work and has the same units as work.

work (joules) = force (newtons) * distance (meters)
power (watts) = work (newton-meters, or joules) / time (seconds)

If one takes the power capacity of a plant and multiplies it by a time, a measure of the amount of work that may be done in that amount of time is obtained. A 1 MW power plant, in one hour, may provide 1MW-hour of work in one hour.

Mowing a lawn for example:

Force needed to push mower = 36 (newtons)
Distance the mower is pushed = 1000 (meters)

36 (newtons) * 1000 (meters) = 36000 (joules) of work

If it takes one hour (3600 seconds) to mow the lawn:

36000 (joules) / 3600 (seconds) = 10 (watts)

Because it took 1 hour to do the work at the rate of 10 watts:

10 (watts) * 1 (hour) = 10 watt-hours, or 36k joules of energy

If it took only 1/2 hour to do the work:

36000 (joules) / 1800 (seconds) = 20 (watts)

and:

20 (watts) * 0.5 (hour) = 10 watt-hours, or 36k joules of energy

Energy is the capacity to do work.

It is worth noting that the units for power, force * distance / time, may also be represented by force * velocity.

36 (newtons) * 1 (kilometer per hour) = 10 (watts)

Answer 8

A watt is a measure of energy or power. A kilowatt is a thousand watts. Most electric bills are by the kilowatt-hour, which is obviously a thousand watts of electricity used in an hour. So since mega means million, a mega watt is 1,000 kilowatts.

Answer 9

power=work done/ time taken.

the unit is watt. that is if you do one joule of work in one second then your power is 1 watt. mega stands for 10^6.

however watt-hour is a different thing. when we use 1 watt of power for an hour it is called watt-hour.the output in joules is: 1*3600=3600watts= 3.6*10^3 joules.

the utility company has a capacity of 1 MW then it produces 1MW in one hour.1 MW-hr is 1MW for 1 hr i.e 1*3.6*10^9 joules

Answer 10

1 mW is 10,00,000 Watt. The utility company has this capacity means that it produces or consumes 10,00,000 Joules per second.

Watt is the short-form for Joule/sec.