I need help understanding electricity measurement

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,604
15
81
Im doing a piece of work about electricity in the UK, im looking at a BERR (Department of Brittish Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) document, its from the government basically and it says that in 2006 industry used 32.6 Mtoe (millions of tonnes of oil equivilent), i worked that out to be 379TWh, then later on it talks about power generation by source, and at the bottom it says total generation available for supply 382TWh. How can that be true?! Theres only 3TwH for everything else that isnt industry, homes, transport etc??

Im certain the BERR document is correct and its simply me not getting something, or missing something. Just in case anyone else has seen these documents its called "BERR - UK Energy in brief 2007". So can someone explain this?

Also! Can someone explain the difference between a Terrawatt and a Terrawatt hour, or point me to an easy to understand website where i can learn stuff like this, for the record i dont do engineering and i sucked at maths in school, so lamens terms are good :)
 

JohnCU

Banned
Dec 9, 2000
16,528
4
0
a Watt is 1 J/s

So, when you multiply that by time, you just get joules, energy.
 

IronWing

No Lifer
Jul 20, 2001
72,970
34,170
136
32.6 Mega tonne of oil equivalent = 379 138 000 000 000 Watt hour so your math is right. However your 382TWh generation number has the wrong units. Power is usually expressed as watts, not watt hours.