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As we catch up from summer vacation, we’re bringing you a favorite from the Shift Key archive. We’ll be back in your feed with more fresh episodes starting next week.
What is the difference between energy and power? How does the power grid work? And what’s the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour?
On this week’s episode, we answer those questions and many, many more. This was the start of Shift Key Summer School, a series of introductory “lecture conversations” meant to cover the basics of energy and the power grid for listeners of every experience level and background. In less than an hour, Rob and former Shift Key co-host Jesse Jenkins, a professor of systems engineering at Princeton University, try to get you up to speed on how to think about energy, power, horsepower, volts, amps, and what uses (approximately) 1 watt-hour, 1 kilowatt-hour, 1 megawatt-hour, and 1 gigawatt-hour.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I’m raising my hand.
Jesse Jenkins: Yeah, okay. Robinson has a question. Yes, Robinson.
Meyer: Okay, so I have a few questions. The first is, I think it is kind of important to establish, like, energy here — the joule — what that changes about a substance — and I realize this is high school physics, physics 101 — is the acceleration, not the velocity. We sometimes think of energy as a property of velocity, but it’s actually the ability to change velocity. That is what energy does.
Jenkins: Right. Yeah, that’s right. I think about the basic Newtonian mechanics, right? If you have an object in a vacuum with no friction, or no forces working against it, it will continue at the same velocity and the same trajectory forever. And so what it requires energy is to change that direction or velocity, which requires acceleration or the application of force to some mass.
Meyer: You just kind of said this, but what is the difference between energy and power?
Jenkins: So energy is the actual thing that ... it’s the quantity of the thing that’s doing work, right? So it’s the amount of fuel we burned, or the number of calories we had to eat to run our bodies over the course of a day, or the amount of electricity we had to generate to run our lights or our computer. Power is the rate at which that energy is consumed or supplied or transported or transformed. And so it is not itself a unit of quantity. You don’t use power. You use energy. Power is the rate at which you’re using energy.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Verse’s software platform Aria helps data centers connect to the grid faster and optimize power operations in real time. Learn more at verse.inc.
RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
