A kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the unit of energy stored in a battery. In nominal terms a 10 kWh battery can supply 1 kilowatt of continuous power for 10 hours, or 2 kilowatts for 5 hours, though usable runtime is lower once depth of discharge and conversion losses are counted.
Why it matters for home backup power
The kWh rating is how you match a battery to your home’s needs during a blackout. To ride out an outage, the battery must hold enough total energy to cover your critical loads across the full outage window. How long a battery will run is always load-dependent: dividing usable kWh by the kilowatts your appliances actually draw gives the hours of backup, and that figure changes every time you switch a load on or off. The kWh value is therefore the starting point for every Время резервного питания calculation.
kWh in practice
Key numbers
Genixgreen LiFePO4 systems run at a nominal 51.2 V and scale in parallel from about 5 kWh to 16 kWh for homes, and into the MWh range for commercial sites. Nameplate capacity is not the same as usable energy. The practical planning figure is about 85 percent of nameplate: usable energy equals nameplate multiplied by depth of discharge (80 to 95 percent) and one-way discharge efficiency (90 to 95 percent)(Source: Battery University BU-808). When sizing, always confirm whether a quoted capacity figure is nominal or usable.
kWh vs kW: the most common buyer confusion
kWh measures energy, the total amount of electricity a battery stores, like the size of a fuel tank. kW measures power, the rate at which energy flows in or out at any moment, like the width of a pipe. A system rated at 5 kW and 10 kWh can drive 5000 watts simultaneously, but carries only 10 hours of energy at 1 kW draw, or 2 hours at 5 kW. Both figures appear on every battery datasheet, and confusing them is the single most common sizing error buyers make. The kWh tells you how far; the kW tells you how fast.
How Genixgreen uses kWh
Genixgreen has built LiFePO4 storage in its own factory since 2011 and ships to 100+ countries, with local stock in Odesa for delivery across Ukraine. Home systems span from about 5 kWh to 16 kWh and are designed to parallel-stack, so capacity can grow without replacing the base unit. Commercial projects scale into the MWh range using the same cell chemistry and BMS architecture. Each product datasheet lists both the nominal and usable kWh figures alongside the rated Ресурс циклов.
Related terms
- Время резервного питания: how a kWh figure translates to runtime at a given load (always load-dependent)
- DoD: the share of nameplate kWh that is safely usable per cycle
- Ресурс циклов: how many full kWh-cycles a battery delivers before capacity falls to 80 percent of original
- Genixgreen product range: kWh specifications across home and commercial systems
- Full glossary: all energy storage terms in the Genixgreen glossary
Sources
- Battery University BU-808: How to prolong lithium-based batteries (depth of discharge, usable capacity planning, efficiency). batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries