BTU Per Hour to Gigawatts (BTU/h to GW)

1 BTU per hour equals 2.930710702×10⁻¹⁰ gigawatts (rounded).

1 BTU per hour = 2.930710702×10⁻¹⁰ gigawatts

How to convert BTU per hour to gigawatts

To convert BTU per hour to gigawatts, multiply the number of BTU per hour by 2.930710702×10⁻¹⁰. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply gigawatts by 3,412,141,633 (rounded).

gigawatts = BTU per hour × 2.930710702×10⁻¹⁰

Example: 10 BTU per hour = 2.930710702×10⁻⁹ gigawatts.

Several different horsepower units exist. This site lists mechanical (745.7 W), metric (735.5 W) and electrical (746 W) horsepower separately.

About these units

BTU Per Hour (BTU/h)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

About 0.293 watts. The rating of air conditioners, furnaces and heaters in the US.

Btu per hour inherits its history from the British thermal unit, which a 1942 note in the journal Nature said apparently originated in the United States and was later adopted in Great Britain. The Btu was defined as the heat needed to raise one pound of liquid water by one degree Fahrenheit at a constant pressure of one atmosphere. Because water's heat capacity varies slightly with temperature, several versions exist, differing by up to 0.5 percent, so the unit has never been quite as tidy as the joule.

Dividing it by time gives a power unit used mainly in North America for heating and cooling equipment, and in the UK mostly for air conditioning. One watt is about 3.412 Btu/h, and one horsepower is about 2,544 Btu/h. Thousands of Btu per hour are often written MBH. Air conditioning capacity is often given in tons, where one ton of cooling is 12,000 Btu/h, about 3.52 kW, the rate needed to freeze one short ton of water into ice in 24 hours.

1 BTU per hour = 0.2930710702 watts (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: British thermal unit; Wikipedia: Watt

Gigawatt (GW)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One billion watts. The scale of large power plants and national grids.

At a billion watts, power stops being a property of a single machine and becomes a property of a power system. A gigawatt is roughly the annually averaged power consumption of a city of 1.8 million inhabitants, and it is used for large power plants, national grids and, increasingly, large data centers. Planners talk in gigawatts because a country's demand, or the capacity of a new wind or solar program, is far too big to quote sensibly in kilowatts.

Some real installations show the scale. The largest unit of Belgium's Doel nuclear station has a peak output of 1.04 GW, some HVDC converters have been built with ratings up to 2 GW, and China's Three Gorges Dam is rated at roughly 22 GW. Germany's installed wind capacity was 25.8 GW in 2010. One common slip is writing gigawatts per hour, which is a rate of change used for grid ramping, when gigawatt-hours, a quantity of energy, is meant.

1 gigawatt = 1,000,000,000 watts (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Gigawatt; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (power)

Related conversions

See all power units.