Roy Tang

Hm, ok let’s try another tack. Amperes, joules and watts aren’t things that you can see or things that move, they’re units of measurement, like a foot or a meter or a mile. When we say “rate” it measures the speed of something like feet per second or miles per hour.

Amperes are something like the speed. When you talk about a car’s speed, it’s in something like miles per hour right? Amperes are like the speed of electricity (to be specific, electric charge). When you say “this wire has 2 amperes”, it means electricity moves through that wire twice as fast as one that only has 1 ampere. Since it’s speed, amperes aren’t something that’s created, it’s just a measurement of speed.

Joules are a unit of work or energy. This means joules measure when force is used to move something over some distance. Like if 2 people are carrying some objects over the same distance; if person A is carrying an object that is twice as heavy as the object carried by person B then we can say person A did twice as many joules of work as person B (heavier objects need more force to be carried)

Watts are a unit of measurement for power; power is the speed of work, or how much work is done in a given time. Let’s say two people carried the same weight of objects over the same distance, then they both did the same amount of work. But if person A did this work in half the time as person B, then we can say person A used up twice as much power (or twice as many watts) as person B

When referring to electricity, joules and watts typically refer to the amount of work or power that was used to generate that electricity. The work/energy is created by machines instead of people.

When you have two devices, say device A is rated at 100 watts and device B is rated at 200 watts. This means device B uses up twice as much electrical energy as device A over the same amount of time. It means the machines generating electricity have to work twice as hard over the same amount of time to power that device.