How many megawatts of electricity does the US use daily?

Question

Also, how exactly is a megawat measured, is it over an hour, a second or something else?

Answer 1

A Watt is a unit of power, that is, a measure of energy produced or consumed per unit of time. In this case it is 1 Watt = 1 Joule / 1 Second. A megawatt is a million watts. If we want energy use in a specific time period, we don't want to measure it in watts (which are POWER, the RATE of energy use, remember). The usual way to measure electric energy consumption (e.g. for your house) is kilowatt-hours (that is, how much power you consume in kilowatts times the number of hours you consumed it). For the US we could use Megawatt-hours (1 megawatt = 1000 kilowatts). From the Department of Energy we find:

"Electricity consumption by 107 million U.S. households in 2001 totaled 1,140 billion kWh. The most significant end uses were central air-conditioning and refrigerators, each of which accounted for about 14 percent of the U.S. total."

But that's only houses. Wikipedia tells us the US uses 4,104,900,000,000 kWh per year. We can divide by 365 to get kWh per day and by 1000 to get megaWatt-hours per day. That is 11,246,301 mWh per day. That's a lot!

Answer 2

It is more accurate to ask ''How many megawatts of electricity does the US produce daily?''

Currently (no pun intended) the U.S. produces an average of about 4,500 Billion megawatts each year. (Get out your calculator.)

The watt (symbol: W) is the SI derived unit of power, equal to one joule per second. A human climbing a flight of stairs is doing work at the rate of about 200 watts; a highly trained athlete can work at up to approximately 2,000 watts for brief periods. An automobile engine produces 25,000 watts (approximately 30 horsepower) while cruising. A typical household incandescent light bulb uses 40 to 100 watts.

The megawatt (symbol: MW) is equal to one million (106) watts.

Answer 3

well, first u measure, of course by the second, and then you will have the answer for ur question.

Answer 4

Megawatt is one million watts, regardless of how long it takes. It's like saying 10oz of soda.

You said "daily" so that is the time measurement. So if the answer (which I don't know) is 300 Megawatts, that means 300 million watts in a day (24 hours).

I just found this:

  http://www.agmrc.org/NR/rdonlyres/A24B58...

it shows the Quadrillion BTUs used, then this converts from BTU to Kilowatts...

1 Kilowatts = Btu/hour x 0.000293

1,000 Kilowatts = 1 Megawatt

Answer 5

The measurement is in watt hours not just watts.

3.717 trillion kWh in 2004. It is over 4 trillion kWh per year by now.

You will have to do the math to convert it to magawatt hours per day.

Answer 6

The United States in January of 2007 used 352,491 thousands of mega-watt hours each day, or another way of stating 352,491 millions of kilo-watt hours each day.

One watt-hour is the amount of energy expended by a one-watt load  drawing power for one hour.  One kilowatt-hour is 1,000 watt-hours and one megawatt-hour is 1,000,000 watt-hours, and one gigawatt-hour is 1,000,000,000 watt-hours.

Answer 7

i'd say at least two or three.

Ask AL Gore, his mansion uses about 10% of the national average.

Answer 8

It's  more than all of the world. Theere is a facility in Nevada is where I beleive, it is used for some crazy experments. When this thing is turned on it produces more energy that's around 2-3 times more than the collective world. This is some kind of speacial experiment can't really tell you its purpose must be really important thuogh.