As more and more families begin to consider the cost of energy, energy types and other issues, the use of solar panel systems to generate electricity is widely used in household power generation and industrial and commercial power generation. The low cost and eco-friendliness of solar power has made it more and more popular, and at the same time more and more people want to learn about energy. In learning energy knowledge and various energy solutions, you may keep seeing kilowatts (KW) and megawatts (MW) and other terms, today’s article will be from a variety of perspectives for you to explain the two units of power, as well as the conversion relationship between the two units.
1. What is a kilowatt (KW)?
Kilowatt (KW) is the unit of power. It is the unit of power equal to 1000w power itself, which means that the device can keep providing 1000w of operating power for a relative period of time.
2. What is megawatt (MW)?
A megawatt is a unit of power equal to 100,0000w of power itself, which indicates that the device is capable of maintaining 100,0000w of operating power over a period of time.
3. The conversion relationship between kilowatts and megawatts
As the kilowatts and megawatts expressed by the same physical quantity of the unit of measurement, the conversion relationship between the two only need to be based on the formula for simple calculations. Specific conversion formula is as follows:
1MW = 1000KW
1KW = 0.001MW
According to the above formula, if you need to convert megawatts to kilowatts, just multiply the kilowatt value by 1000, if you need to convert kilowatts to megawatts, just divide the megawatt value by 1000, in order to facilitate your better grasp of the above conversion formula, the following will be used as an example of a solar power plant, if the local solar power plant in the peak sunshine hours in the power generation to reach 10MW, it will be converted into kilowatt, that is, 10MW × 1000 = 1,0000KW.
4. Other questions about kilowatts and megawatts
4.1 Which power unit is more commonly used, kilowatt or megawatt? What is the unit of power generated by solar panels?
Generally speaking, kilowatts as a power unit is more common in our daily life, for example, the power unit of large household appliances is basically kilowatts, and the power generated by solar panels is usually chosen to be in kilowatts, and the specific pricing is based on per watt or per kilowatt. The main reason for this is that using kilowatts as the unit of solar panels can better help determine the size of solar panels needed for each household, because the power unit of household appliances is basically watts or kilowatts, and the unit of energy consumption of the entire household is basically kilowatt-hours, which can be converted by introducing the working time between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours.
4.2 Why megawatts are equally important
While the unit of measurement of megawatts is too large for most home systems, and a home solar system’s generating power rarely reaches megawatts as a unit of measurement, megawatts is a more appropriate unit of measurement for some commercial and industrial use of solar power systems.
To solar power plants, for example, with the continuous development of solar power technology, the cost of its use year by year to reduce the effect of power generation is constantly improving, some utility companies began to try to use solar power for the user’s energy supply, these solar power plant power generation is huge, if measured in kilowatts, the value is too large, so usually need to megawatts to be measured, and the solar power plant to produce the electricity The power produced by solar power plants usually needs to be measured in megawatt hours as well.
