mopc said:
Ok that sounds wrong, but how would you correct my explanation?
mopc, if you delve now into the subject of how motors and generators work, that's like skipping a hundred pages in the textbook before your real solid about the previous chapter.
The kind of questions you are asking indicate that you're not completely familiar with the concepts of potential energy, and this is where an analogy with gravity is helpful.
In a gravitational field, if you lift a mass to a higher altitude, say, you carry a rock to the top of a mountain, you're giving it potential energy, because when you release it then it will fall back down. You did work to displace it in the non-spontaneous direction, upward, and when it's released it will respond to a field that exists in its vicinity of space, gravity, by accelerating in its spontaneous direction, downward.
Electricity is very similar, but now it's an electric field instead of a gravitational field. If you move a positive charge closer to the positive terminal, or move a negative charge closer to the negative terminal, you're doing work on it to compel it to go in the direction that it's naturally repelled from. This gives it potential energy. Then you will observe that it moves spontaneously the other way, a positive charge moving toward the negative terminal, or a negative charge moving toward the positive terminal.
A battery has a chemical reaction that continuously puts out electrons in one place and takes in electrons in another place, causing regions of space that have relatively higher and lower potentials to be maintained. What a battery is doing is like a person doing work to carry a bunch of rocks up to the top of a mountain, and allowing them to roll back down, continuously putting things in a location where they will acquire potential energy, the tendency to start moving spontaneously in the opposite way.
You also asked about the meaning of the word "power". To continue the analogy with gravity:
To get to the units of energy per unit time, which we call power, simple reasoning will tell you that you will have two variables to multiply. One variable is current, and that's analogous to how many buckets of rocks you have to carry in a given amount of time. The other variable is voltage, which is like the fact that you're carrying those buckets of rocks up a steep slope instead of carrying them on level ground. You will have to multiply these two things. Therefore, power means current multiplied by voltage.
Numerical example with units: If 5 amperes of current flow, which means the movement of charged particles at rate of 5 coulombs per second, and if these charged particles are being displaced across a potential difference of 10 volts, then power is being delivered at a rate of 50 watts, which means electrical energy is supplied at a rate of 50 joules per second.
These are still not enough fundamentals to explain how motors and generators work, which requires a discussion of additional effects, the magnetic field and magnetic forces.