SIMPLIFIED: "7.7: Power"

Link: https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/College_Physics/College_Physics_1e_(OpenStax)/07%3A_Work_Energy_and_Energy_Resources/7.07%3A_Power 

Note: The above image is from the original article.

What exactly is power? Is it the strength of something? In terms of physics, power is the rate that work is being done. In other words, power is how fast energy is being transferred because work can be classified as the change in energy. The mathematical equation to calculate power is this: P = W / t, where P represents power, W represents work, and t represents time. You can tell by the equation that power is literally equal to the total amount of work over the time it took to do that work. It is very important to know units, and the unit for power is the watt. One watt is the same thing as joules over seconds. I will also point out that a watt is NOT the same thing as horsepower, although horsepower is used in everyday life to describe the power of something. 

Let’s look at a quick example to describe power more conceptually. Say there are two people, both tasked to run up a flight of stairs. Person A does it in 5 seconds, while person B takes 15 seconds. Person A and person B have both done the same amount of work, but person A has produced or used MORE power because they have done that same amount of work in a shorter amount of time. Since time is the variable in the denominator for the equation to calculate power, decreasing time means power increases. 

When it comes to more real-world applications, many people compare power when comparing cars. The metric they use like I said earlier is horsepower. For a comparison, one horsepower is around 746 watts. A car with more horsepower literally means it can transfer energy at a faster rate. The phrase “transfer energy at a faster rate” is a bit confusing, and it means that energy is being transformed into things like heat, light, or other energies like kinetic energy.