1.7 Power  (Page 3/8)

Electricity bills state the energy used in units of kilowatt-hours $(\text{kW}\cdot \mathrm{h}),$ which is the product of power in kilowatts and time in hours. This unit is convenient because electrical power consumption at the kilowatt level for hours at a time is typical.

The motivation to save energy has become more compelling with its ever-increasing price. Armed with the knowledge that energy consumed is the product of power and time, you can estimate costs for yourself and make the necessary value judgments about where to save energy. Either power or time must be reduced. It is most cost-effective to limit the use of high-power devices that normally operate for long periods of time, such as water heaters and air conditioners. This would not include relatively high power devices like toasters, because they are on only a few minutes per day. It would also not include electric clocks, in spite of their 24-hour-per-day usage, because they are very low power devices. It is sometimes possible to use devices that have greater efficiencies—that is, devices that consume less power to accomplish the same task. One example is the compact fluorescent light bulb, which produces over four times more light per watt of power consumed than its incandescent cousin.

Modern civilization depends on energy, but current levels of energy consumption and production are not sustainable. The likelihood of a link between global warming and fossil fuel use (with its concomitant production of carbon dioxide), has made reduction in energy use as well as a shift to non-fossil fuels of the utmost importance. Even though energy in an isolated system is a conserved quantity, the final result of most energy transformations is waste heat transfer to the environment, which is no longer useful for doing work. As we will discuss in more detail in Thermodynamics , the potential for energy to produce useful work has been “degraded” in the energy transformation.

Section summary

• Power is the rate at which work is done, or in equation form, for the average power $P$ for work $W$ done over a time $t$ , $P=W/t$ .
• The SI unit for power is the watt (W), where $\text{1 W}=\text{1 J/s}$ .
• The power of many devices such as electric motors is also often expressed in horsepower (hp), where $\text{1 hp}=\text{746 W}$ .