WSJ: Big tech firms seeking power

Sat Jun 17 02:09:37 UTC 2006

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006, Alex Rubenstein wrote:

>>> more like 154,000,000 BTU, /12000 or 12,798 tons.
>> 
>> Well, the bigger problem here is that a watt is a measure of
>> power (engergy/time) and a BTU is a unit of energy. There is no
>> dimensionless conversion factor between the two.
>
> Huh?
>
> A Watt has no time constant. A watt is an amount of energy consumed at a 
> moment (ie, a 60 watt light bulb), not an amount of energy over time (like a 
> watt-hour; for instance, a 60 watt light bulb uses 60 watt-hours of power 
> every hour, or 1.44 kwatt-hrs per day).

Since you like Wikipedia so much, why don't you look it up:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt

Watt is not amount of power but amount of power produced during time, i.e.
its speed of energy consumption.

However kwatt-hour (I've never heard of watt-hour, but I suppose that
maybe used too..) is actually amount of energy consumed - more precisely
X kwr its how much energy device would consume if it were consuming 
energy at exactly the same speed of X kw for entire hour.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net