kW and kWh Explained

A lot of people, energy professionals included, don't fully understand the

difference between kW and kWh. If you are one of them, fear not, this
article should set you straight!
Energy calculations, and energy saving, become much easier when you understand the
difference between a kW and a kWh.

If you're working with energy on a regular basis, and you don't fully
understand the difference between a kW and a kWh, we promise you that
taking 20 minutes or so to fully understand the concepts explained in this
article will save you many headaches in the future. Quite likely it will save
you some embarrassment at some point too, as you'll be much less likely to
make embarrassing calculation errors.
(If at any point you'd like to thank us for our help in reducing headaches and
embarrassment, please point your colleagues and website visitors towards
this article so that it can help them too. Or, if you find it useful, you could
buy or recommend our Energy Lens software - we really appreciate the
customers that keep us in business.)
Anyway, that's more than enough preamble... Let's get to it...
What is the difference between a kW and a kWh?
Well, the difference is really very simple. Though it only seems
simple after you understand it.
kWh is a measure of energy, whilst kW is a measure of power...

OK, but a lot of people don't really understand the difference between
energy and power either... So let's start at the beginning:
What is energy?
Energy is a measure of how much fuel is contained within something, or used by
something over a specific period of time.
The kWh is a unit of energy.

(A physicist might throw their arms up in disgust at how we've oversimplified one of the fundamentals of the universe. But fortunately we're not
writing this for physicists...)
The kilowatt hour (kWh) is a unit of energy... The Calorie is a unit of
energy... And the joule (J) is a unit of energy... And these aren't the only

units of energy - there's the BTU, the watt hour (Wh), the therm, and plenty
of obscure units that you're unlikely to have heard of.
It's a bit like how you can measure distance in units of feet, metres, miles,
km and so on. The distance between New York and London is fixed, but you
canexpress that distance as 3,459 miles, or 5,567 km, or 18,265,315 feet
etc. Similarly, you can express a measure of energy in joules, or Calories, or
kWh, or BTU etc.
When people talk about a particular biscuit containing 172 Calories, they're
talking about the amount of energy contained within that biscuit. 172
Calories is equivalent to around 0.0002 kWh.
Energy can change form. We could eat the biscuit to provide us with energy.
Or we could burn the biscuit and turn it into heat energy. Given the right
equipment we could turn the heat energy from the burning biscuit into
electrical energy to run lights and fans and so on. Some energy would be
wasted in the conversion process, but it should be possible to get that
burning biscuit to run a light bulb for at least a few seconds.
Probably the best option would be to eat the biscuit, but hopefully you get
the general idea - the biscuit contains energy that can be converted into
different forms...
Electricity and other fuels supply energy in a form that we can use to run the equipment in
our buildings.

Our biscuits contain a certain amount of energy - 172 Calories or 0.0002

kWh per biscuit. But biscuit energy is not in a form that we can easily use to
run the equipment in our buildings...
However, we can easily make use of electricity. And, provided we've got a
gas or oil burner, we can easily make use of gas or oil. One form of energy
comes through wires (isn't electricity clever?!), and others come as gases,
liquids, or solids that we burn (to turn into heat). At the end of the day it's
all just usable energy in different forms. We can express quantities of these
forms of energy in terms of kWh. We buy or generate the kWh of energy,
and we use it to fuel the equipment in our buildings.
The relationship between energy consumption (kWh) and time
A typical building uses more energy over long periods of time than it does
over short periods of time:

On February 16th 2010 a building might have used 95 kWh.

Over the week starting April 12th 2010 it might have used 550 kWh.

From January 1st 2009 to December 31st 2009 it might have used
31,250 kWh.

Given the three figures above, we can easily see that the building used more
energy over the course of 2009 than it did on February 16th 2010. No
surprises there.
However, we can't immediately compare the efficiency of the building over
each of those periods. If a kWh figure covers a day, we can only compare it
fairly with other kWh figures that cover a day. If a kWh figure covers a week,
we can only fairly compare it with other kWh figures that cover a week.
If we have the kWh from February and the kWh from March, we can't really
compare the two figures fairly, because February is typically 28 days long,
whilst March is 31 days long. This article explains more about the problems
that arise if you compare the kWh used in one month with the kWh used in
the next.
Energy consumption expressed in terms of kWh doesn't often mean much
unless you also know the length of the period that the kWh were measured
over. And it's difficult to make fair comparisons between kWh figures unless
they are all from periods of exactly the same length. Figures expressed in
terms of power (e.g. kW) make many things more straightforward...
What is power?
Power is the rate at which energy is generated or used.
The kW is a unit of power.

(Strictly speaking energy isn't actually generated or used, it's converted

from one form into another. Like how the energy stored in oil is converted
into heat when you burn it. And like how the electricity that runs a fan is
converted into the motion of the fan blade (kinetic energy). But this is a
distinction that people generally don't worry about when they're staring at
an excessive energy bill and wondering how they can "use" less energy.)
So power is a measure of how fast something is generating or using energy.
The higher a building's kW, the faster that building is using energy.
Joules per second (J/s) is a nice, clear unit of power. Joules per second
makes it obvious that power is the rate at which energy is being generated
or used. It's like how miles per hour makes it obvious that speed is the rate
at which distance is being travelled.

James Watt
The watt (W) is another unit of power. It doesn't make it quite so obvious
what power means. But the watt is actually just another name for Joules per
second. J/s and W are the same thing. Just some bright spark decided that
equations and whatnot would be simpler if power had its own unit (instead
of being expressed using units of energy and time together). And they
named this unit after James Watt, the Scottish inventor who had an
important hand in the development of the steam engine.
So, joules per second (J/s) is a measure of power... The watt (W) is a
measure of power... And the kilowatt (kW) is a measure of power too (one
kW being 1000 watts).
Things that "generate power"
Items of equipment like boilers, electricity generators, and wind turbines,
take energy in one form (e.g. gas or oil or wind) and turn it into another
(e.g. heat or electricity).
There's a limit to how much useful stuff these things can generate, and that
is expressed as the rate at which they can generate energy. Which is, by
definition, their power.
Consider a 10 kW wind turbine... Provided it has the optimum level of wind
(which probably doesn't happen nearly as often as its owner would like), it
can generate 10 kW of power.
How long does it take to generate 10 kW...? Bzzz! No! Wrong question!
That's a question that would only be asked by somebody that didn't
understand what power was. It's a bit like asking "how long does it take to
travel 10 miles per hour?" It makes no sense.
10 kW is the rate at which the wind turbine can generate energy, not
the amount of energy that it can generate in a certain period of time. The
two are closely connected, but we'll get to that shortly.
Things that "use power"

Items of electrical equipment like light bulbs, computers, and fans, take
energy in the form of electricity, and use it to do useful things for us. Really
they'reconverting the energy into other forms (heat, motion etc.), but we
say that they're "using" it because we don't really care about what exactly is
happening to it, we just want our equipment to work when we switch it on
and stop when we switch it off.
The rate at which these things use energy is their power. Or, depending on
the thing, and the person you're talking to, you might hear it called their
"load" or their "demand", or you might just hear it referred to in terms of a
W or kW value.
Light bulbs are a simple example: if you have a 100 W light bulb you know
that it will use 100 W of power when it's running (100 W of power being the
same as 0.1 kW of power). The watts aren't affected by how long the 100 W
light bulb is running for... A second, an hour, a day - no difference - so long
as it's switched on it will be using 100 W of power. If it's not switched on it
won't be using any power (i.e. 0 W).
Some equipment is more complicated. Consider a laptop: at any one instant
it might be using 50 W of power, or 30 W of power, or 43 W of power, or any
similar such value. It depends on what it's doing - if it's sitting there doing
nothing it'll probably use less power than if you're hammering away on an
Excel spreadsheet, listening to some music, and burning a DVD, all at the
same time.
We make a distinction between instantaneous power and average power:
Instantaneous power
The instantaneous power (or instantaneous demand, or instantaneous load)
is the power that something is using (or generating) at any one moment in
time. Put your laptop on standby and its instantaneous power will drop
immediately. Bring it back to life and its instantaneous power will rise
immediately.
If, at any particular moment, everything in an office building is switched on,
that office building might be using 42 kW of power. That's 42 kW of
instantaneous power. If, at any particular moment, everything in the office
building is switched off, that building should be using 0 kW of power. That's 0
kW of instantaneous power.
The instantaneous power of most buildings varies constantly. People are
constantly switching things on and off, and many items of equipment within
the building have instantaneous power that is constantly changing too.
Average power

The average power represents the power that something uses or generates,
on average:

over a specific period of time (e.g. yesterday); or

over multiple periods of time (e.g. across all the weekends on record);
or

throughout a certain type of operation (e.g. typical laptop usage, or

typical building usage - Monday to Friday 09:00 to 17:00, or typical
efficiency for something that's generating power).

Remember our example of an office building that uses 42 kW of power when

everything's switched on, and 0 kW of power when everything's switched
off? If, on average, half the things in the office building are switched on, and
half are switched off, then the average power will be around 21 kW overall
(21 kW being half of 42 kW).
Or maybe that's just the average power of the office building on weekdays.
On weekends, when people are at home, and most equipment in the building
is switched off, the average power might be lower, maybe 5 or 10 kW.
Average power enables you think of complicated things, like buildings, as if they were
simple things, like light bulbs...

The instantaneous power of a typical building varies all the time. If you try
to monitor instantaneous power you get lost in the noise. And figures of
energy consumption are meaningless unless you know the length of the
periods that they were measured over. But average-power figures smooth
out the constant fluctuations of instantaneous power, and make it possible to
compare the efficiency of different periods, like for like, without worrying
about how long those periods were. For example:

The building used 41 kW (on average) across the whole of last week.

The building used 19 kW (on average) across all the Saturdays and
Sundays since March 2009. (We don't need to care how many Saturdays
and Sundays there were since March 2009.)

The building used 38 kW (on average) between 09:00 and 17:00 on

3rd May 2010. That's double the average kW of a typical weekend, and
that's bad because 3rd May was a bank holiday and the building was
closed.

You can easily use these average-kW figures to compare the energy
consumption of different periods and even different buildings (we use the
term "energy consumption" loosely because really we're talking about
average power, not energy). It's a bit like comparing the fuel consumption of
cars:

On long journeys my car does an average of 45 miles per gallon. My

brother's car does an average of 41.

Around town my car does an average of 32 miles per gallon. My

brother's car does an average of 29.

These average-mpg figures would typically be calculated across multiple

different journeys, each covering different distances... But you can compare
the figures like for like, without worrying about the details of the specific
journeys that they were calculated from. Average power works in the same
way, but with energy instead of distance.
Average power, typically measured in kW, is a great way to look at the energy usage * of a
building. In many ways average-kW figures are easier to work with than kWh figures.

In this instance "energy usage" refers to the rate at which the energy is
used (i.e. power). To remove ambiguity we might call it "average power", or
"load", or "demand". "Energy usage" and "energy consumption" are
somewhat loose terms that can be used to refer to the rate of energy usage
(e.g. 10 kW) or the total amount of energy used over a specified period
(e.g. 240 kWh on Feb 21st 2010).
*

The beauty of average-kW figures is that you can compare them fairly in an
instant. The length of the time period doesn't really matter. So you can look
at the average-kW figures from 15-minute interval data and compare them
directly with the average-kW figures from 60-minute data or from halfhourly data. Or you can instantly compare the average kW from last month
with the average kW from yesterday and the average kW from the whole of
last year. If these were kWh figures, the fact that they come from periods of
different length would mean that you'd need to normalize them before you
could compare them fairly. kW figures come ready normalized.
Different names for power - "load", "demand" etc.
People often refer to power as the "load" or the "demand". So you might
hear average power referred to as "average load", or "average demand".
Whilst "power" can refer to the power that something is using or generating,
"load" and "demand" only ever refer to the power that something is using.
You might hear the power that something is generating, or can generate,
referred to as its "output".
People sometimes use the word "mean" in place of "average", so you might
also hear of "mean power", or "mean load", or "mean demand", or "mean
kW".
And people often don't make the distinction between average power and
instantaneous power. You can ask them to clarify, but it can be a little

embarrassing if they don't understand the distinction in the first place...

Fortunately, when you hear someone talking about "power", or "load", or
"demand", or "kW", you can usually tell from the context whether they're
talking about average or instantaneous figures.
The relationship between energy and power
The relationship between energy and power is a lot like the relationship
between distance and speed:

Energy is like distance. The amount of energy that you used over a
specific period of time is like the distance that you travelled over a
specific period of time. (e.g. when driving to work you travelled 2 miles
between 08:04 and 08:57 - horrible horrible traffic!)

Power is like speed. Your instantaneous power is like your speed at a

specific instant in time (e.g. right now). Your average power over a
specific period of time is like your average speed over a specific period of
time. (e.g. when driving to work you travelled at an average speed of
2.26 mph - you might as well have walked...)

Both distance and speed are useful measures. And both are closely related.
Sometimes it makes sense to talk in terms of distance, and sometimes it
makes sense to talk in terms of speed. It's the same for energy and power you need both, but usually one makes more sense than the other.
Newbies to energy often try to use energy (kWh) for everything (sometimes
calling it kW by accident), but more experienced folks tend to use power
(kW) a lot more.
The equation connecting energy and power
Following is the fundamental equation that connects energy and power. You
might remember it from school:
energy = power * time

We can express this equation in terms of kW, kWh, and hours (h):
kWh

kW

Where:
kWh is the energy
kW is the power
h is the time in hours

You might also remember from school that equations can be rearranged:
power = energy
time

or:

kW

kWh
h

Also:
time = energy
power

or:
h

kWh
kW

Given a value for any two of the following: average power (kW), total energy
(kWh), hours (h), you should be able to use the formulae above to calculate
the value of the third.
You should also be able to convert between other units of energy, power, and
time, given that:

15 minutes is 0.25 hours, 30 minutes is 0.5 hours, a day is 24 hours, a

week is 24 * 7 hours etc;

a kW is 1000 W and a W is 0.001 kW;

a kWh is 1000 Wh and a Wh is 0.001 kWh;

a MW (megawatt) is 1000 kW and a kW is 0.001 MW;

a MWh (megawatt hour) is 1000 kWh and a kWh is 0.001 MWh; and

any other conversions between units that measure the same thing
(like different units of energy, or different units of power, or different
units of time) are widely available online.

Our Energy Lens software does a lot of the conversions for you
automatically. Once you've loaded some data into Energy Lens you can
easily plot charts and calculate figures in units of kWh (energy) or in units of
kW (average power), or a mixture of both. It's just a question of choosing
the units you want before you click one of the buttons to create a chart or
table.
The importance of knowing the units of your source data
When you're working with records of energy consumption, it's critical that
you know what units they're in. Otherwise all your calculated figures can
easily come out wrong.
Think about it: if you have 30-minute interval data with readings in kWh, but
you treat those readings as if they are in kW (average kW, strictly speaking),
everything that you calculate further on will be out by a factor of 2:

1 kWh over a 30 minute period = 1 kWh

1 kW over a 30 minute period = 1 * 0.5 = 0.5 kWh (using kWh = kW

* h, and 30 mins = 0.5 hours)

i.e. if your source data has readings in kWh but you treat them as if they are
in kW, everything that you calculate from that point on will be working on
the assumption that your energy consumption is half what it really is.
Similarly, if your source 30-minute data has readings in kW, and you
erroneously treat those readings as kWh, everything that you calculate
further on will be twice what it should be.
If you're using 15-minute data, getting the units of the source data wrong
can easily make all your calculations out by a factor of 4. (The factor of 4
comes from the fact that there are four 15-minute periods in an hour.)
If you're using Energy Lens for your data analysis, you need to make sure to
specify the units correctly when you load the data into Energy Lens. Provided
the data is loaded with the right units, you can use whatever units you like
for your analysis - Energy Lens will take care of all the conversions correctly.
The only requirement is that you specify the correct units at the data-loading
stage.
Calculating cost
At the simplest level cost is usually expressed in terms of /kWh or $/kWh
or /kWh or p/kWh or c/kWh (or whatever-unit-of-currency-you-have per
kWh). It makes sense that cost should be calculated per kWh (not per kW),
because cost is a cumulative thing - the more energy you use, the more it
costs.
Let's pretend we're working in /kWh... To work out the total cost over a
specific period, calculate the total number of kWh over that period, and
multiply that by the /kWh. That will give you the total cost in . Simple.
However, in reality, cost calculations are usually more complicated:

Prices change over time. One month you're paying x /kWh, the next
month you're paying y /kWh. Unfortunately y is usually greater than x,
as energy prices typically rise over time.

Electricity costs can depend on the time of the day, the day of the
week, and the time of the year. Energy suppliers/utilities come up with
complicated tariffs to define these rules. Just like prices, tariff structures
can also change over time.

Electricity costs can also depend on the maximum demand, or peak

load, across a period. For example, given half-hourly data for a month,
the peak load or maximum demand could be defined as the half-hour

period that had the highest average kW. The higher the peak load, the
higher the peak-load charge (or maximum-demand charge).

Electricity tariffs often charge different rates depending on how many

kWh you use. For example, the first 100 kWh might cost x /kWh, the
next might cost y /kWh.

There are often standing charges - regular fixed fees that aren't
related to how much energy you use.

All in all, if you're looking to reduce energy consumption it's usually much
easier to spend most of your time working in units of kW and kWh. The
occasional cost figure can be useful for showing to non-technical folks
(everyone understands pounds and pence, dollars and cents), but cost
figures aren't very good for accurate, in-depth analysis of energy-usage
patterns (e.g. to find opportunities to save energy and to track progress at
doing so).