Glossary entry (derived from question below)
Spanish term
Spain
+34 669 829 437 [email protected]
Native in: English 
Works in: Spanish to English, German to English, Catalan to English
MWs
La vida media de los MW’s de la flota de XXX, para un total de 6.047 turbinas y 7.023 MW es de 7’58 años. Los MW más antiguos de XXX, son unos 862 MW cuya instalación tuvo lugar anterior al 1-1-2002, suponen el 12’3% del total, esas instalaciones llevan operando durante más de 12 años.
TIA!!
| 4 | MWs |
Jennifer Levey
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PRO (1): Yvonne Becker
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Proposed translations
Chile
Human-scale Globalization
Native in: English (Variant: British) 
Works in: Spanish to English, French to English, English to Spanish, and 2 more.
MWs
In this paragraph, MW is a purely statistical concept. Basically, they are calculating the "instantaneous real capacity to generate power per MW of nominal turbine capacity installed at that same instant" - which (being lazy) I will abbreviate to "IRCGP/PCI". In other words, "IRCGP/PCI" is an estimate of "instantaneous reliability". Then, the "mean MW service life" (expressed in years, not megawatts, although they abbreviate it to 'MW') is the MTTF (mean time to failure), corresponding to that "IRCGP/PCI"
This MW will depend on how many of the installed turbines are actually serviceable, and their respective nominal capacities, but is independent of whether they are actually generating power at that instant (for lack of wind, for example, or routine maintenance).
In order to draw useful conclusions from the complex dataset, they are comparing the "mean MW (service life)" for the whole set of 6,047 turbines, and comparing that to the mean for a sub-set comprising only the oldest turbines; and they are saying that those oldest turbines, considered as a sub-set, have, on average, already had a longer service life than the mean of the whole 6,047, hence there's justification for basing future planning on the assumption that the newer turbines will also be serviceable for as much as 12 years (all other things being equal, of course).
I am sure you can translate MW as MW and no-one will argue with you!
HTH
| Thanks so much for such a detailed answer! Yes, this makes sense to me now! |
Discussion
Yes, they do distinguish between the number of turbines and the number of MW, but I don't think this contradicts the interpretation I'm suggesting. The actual number of turbines and their generating capacity are different figures, depending, of course, on how much each turbine produces, but the latter is the more important. Installing X MW means installing the requisite number of turbines to produce X MW, and to say that the MW have a certain age would simply mean that that amount of productive capacity has been installed and running for that length of time.
MW is a measure of productive capacity, not of power produced, which is MWh (or TWh over a period of a year or several years).
Here's another document that bandies these terms about:
http://www.energynews.es/en-2013-se-han-instalado-mas-de-1-5...
So linguistically MW would be a kind of metonym here: "los MW más antiguos" would be the oldest MW-generating turbines.