The scale of megawatt-hours and megawatts has been expanding rapidly, as battery energy storage systems muscle into grid space. We thought it could be useful to remind visitors of the difference. The same principles apply to watts and watt-hours too. So you may also find the information useful for your home energy project.
Lining Up Megawatts and Megawatt Hours
- A MEGAWATT is a source of power able to send out one million watts. If your UPS is is rated 1,000 watts, then one megawatt equates to a thousand of those. All power utilities use megawatts as a measure of the capacity of their system.
- A MEGAWATT-HOUR, on the other hand represents how much power a system can actually deliver over one hour. So, if we were to draw 1,000 watts out of that UPS, the battery would last one hour. And if we drew 500, it would last twice as long.
To put things a little differently again, we could compare that UPS to a pipe carrying water. In that case, the megawatts represent the diameter of the pipe, while the megawatt-hours are the actual amount of water flow in one hour. But how would we experience those megawatt-hours and megawatts in real life? Let’s get practical!
Those Measures of Electricity in Real Time
A thousand megawatts, or a thousand UPS systems are difficult to tie down in our minds. Would it help if we told you a one-megawatt UPS could drive two average refrigerators for a whole year? Or propel a typical electric car for 4,000 miles if we drove it moderately?
Rated Power puts it differently again, by explaining we could power our average home for an entire month on one megawatt-hour, or toast 90,000 slices of bread. Although quite why we would want to do that we can’t imagine. We hope our post helps you understand how megawatt hours and megawatts work.
More Information
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