Power

These notes are intended to accompany the slide presentation entitled ‘Power’ available from The Gaia
Project at www.thegaiaproject.ca.

For more information, please contact brian.mccain@thegaiaproject.ca

Slide Number Description

1 Title Slide

These slides are intended to cover the subject of Power, including:

 What is power, and how is it different from energy
 Calculating power from energy and time, or energy from power and time
 Calculating electric power from voltage, current and resistance
 Units of power

It is intended that this series of slides follow on from the series entitled ‘Energy’.

2 Energy or Power

These are two terms that often get used in everyday language to mean the same
thing; however, while they are related, they have two different meanings.

Specifically, power is the rate at which energy is converted.

Where:
 P is power in Watts
 E is energy in Joules
 t is time in seconds

So while energy is measured in Joules, power is measured in Joules per second.

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3 Power

An analogy of the relationship between energy and power can be made to distance
and speed. Speed is the rate at which distance is travelled, just like power is the
rate at which energy is used. So while distance is measured in metres, speed is
measured in metres per second.

Energy and distance are amounts, while power and speed are rates.

4 Power

If a light bulb converts 3600 Joules of electrical energy into light and heat energy
every minute, we can figure out how much power it is using.

( )( )

5 Power

Conversely, a 100W bulb being used for two hours would convert the following
amount of energy from electricity into primarily heat and light.

( )( ) ( )

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6 Electric Power

The amount of electrical power being used by an object can be calculated using the
formula:

Where:
 V is the Voltage across an object, measured in Volts (V)
 I is the Current through the object, measured in Amps (A)
 P is the Power used by the object, measured in Watts (W)

Given that we know the relationship between Current, Voltage and Resistance, we
can express this in many different ways, such as:

( )

( )

Where
 R is the Resistance of the object, measured in Ohms (Ω)

7 Electric Power Example

For example, most AC Adaptors for charging items such as cell phones have their
specifications written on them.

If a cell phone charger claims to output 12V and 0.5A, we can calculate the power
being delivered to the cell phone:

( )( )

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8 Electrical Energy Example

We’ve already discussed how power is the rate at which energy is the rate at which
energy is converted, while energy is the amount of energy converted in a given
time.

So using the previously shown equation, we can calculate how much energy is used
by the same cell phone charger in an hour.

( )( ) ( )( )( )

9 Units

Another unit often used of power, particularly when dealing with motors, is
horsepower.

10 Units

On our electricity bills, we usually see that we are billed in kilowatt-hours, or kWh.
Since this unit has the word Watt in it, many people would think that it is a unit of
power, but it is in fact a unit of energy.

A kilowatt-hour (not kilowatts per hour) is the amount of energy in a kilowatt of

power used for an hour. So:

( ) ( )

11 Units Example

We can convert Joules to Watt-hours by dividing by 3,600

So, if a device uses 100MJ of electrical energy, we can say it used:

( )

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