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Electric power is the rate of transfer of electrical energy within a circuit.Its SI unit is the watt, the general unit of power, defined as one joule per second.Standard prefixes apply to watts as with other SI units: thousands, millions and billions of watts are called kilowatts, megawatts and gigawatts respectively.
The output power of a motor is the product of the torque that the motor generates and the angular velocity of its output shaft. Likewise, the power dissipated in an electrical element of a circuit is the product of the current flowing through the element and of the voltage across the element. [1] [2]
For a simple electrical circuit running on direct current, the electrical current and voltage are constant.In that case, the real power (P, measured in watts) is the product of the current (I, measured in amperes) and the voltage from one side of the circuit to the other (V, measured in volts):
In terms of electromagnetism, one watt is the rate at which electrical work is performed when a current of one ampere (A) flows across an electrical potential difference of one volt (V), meaning the watt is equivalent to the volt-ampere (the latter unit, however, is used for a different quantity from the real power of an electrical circuit).
The plotted line represents the variation of instantaneous voltage (or current) with respect to time. This cycle repeats with a frequency that depends on the power system. In electrical engineering, three-phase electric power systems have at least three conductors carrying alternating voltages that are offset in time by one-third of the period ...
The portion of instantaneous power that, averaged over a complete cycle of the AC waveform, results in net transfer of energy in one direction is known as instantaneous active power, and its time average is known as active power or real power.
The red curve shows the power in the load, normalized relative to its maximum possible. The dark blue curve shows the efficiency η. The efficiency η is the ratio of the power dissipated by the load resistance R L to the total power dissipated by the circuit (which includes the voltage source's resistance of R S as well as R L):
Illustration of the "reference directions" of the current (), voltage (), and power () variables used in the passive sign convention.If positive current is defined as flowing into the device terminal which is defined to be positive voltage, then positive power (big arrow) given by the equation = represents electric power flowing into the device, and negative power represents power flowing out.