Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A Why is it is always power consumption or power delivered more in usage?

Power makes sense for steady state conditions. A certain energy will be used over one second. Then the same energy will be used the next second. And the next second. If I told you that such a c...

posted 3y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Olin Lathrop‭ · 2021-03-20T21:32:28Z (about 3 years ago)
Power makes sense for steady state conditions.  A certain energy will be used over one second.  Then the same energy will be used the next second.  And the next second.  If I told you that such a circuit used 3 J, the first thing you'd ask is "When?", "Over what time?".  Only knowing that is used 3 J at some time if it's doing the same thing over and over again is rather useless.

What matters in that case is the energy used <i>per time</i>.  That comes up so often that we have a special name for it: "Power".

In some cases energy usage is "one off", and then it does make sense to talk about energy instead of power.  For example, charging a capacitor to a particular voltage takes a fixed amount of energy, regardless of how fast or slow that energy is delivered.  The same is true for how much energy an inductor can store before it saturates.

Power and energy are different metrics, so they have their different uses.  We use whichever fits best to describe whatever phenomenon we are talking about.