Distinction Between Energy and Power
Although in everyday usage the terms energy and power are essentially synonyms, scientists and engineers distinguish between them. In its technical sense, power is not at all the same as energy, but is the rate at which energy is converted (or, equivalently, at which work is performed). Thus a hydroelectric plant, by allowing the water above the dam to pass through turbines, converts the water's potential energy into kinetic energy and ultimately into electric energy, whereas the amount of electric energy that is generated per unit of time is the electric power generated. The same amount of energy converted through a shorter period of time is more power over that shorter time.
Read more about this topic: Energy, Energy in Various Contexts
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