Gigawatt (GW)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

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

About the gigawatt

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.

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

Gigawatt conversion chart

1 gigawatt expressed in every other power unit:

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