Gigawatts to Megawatts (GW to MW)

1 gigawatt equals 1,000 megawatts exactly.

1 gigawatt = 1,000 megawatts

How to convert gigawatts to megawatts

To convert gigawatts to megawatts, multiply the number of gigawatts by 1,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply megawatts by 0.001.

megawatts = gigawatts × 1,000

Example: 10 gigawatts = 10,000 megawatts.

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

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)

Megawatt (MW)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million watts. Used for power plants and large industrial loads.

Million-watt figures appear wherever machines do work on an industrial scale, and the megawatt is the natural unit for them. Large electric motors, warships, data centers and some scientific equipment such as supercolliders operate at this level, and a large residential or commercial building may use several megawatts of electric power. It is not a unit with a famous inventor: it is the watt multiplied by the SI prefix mega, standing for one million.

Transport gives some vivid comparisons. Heavy diesel-electric locomotives typically produce and use 3 to 5 MW, modern high-powered electric locomotives peak at 5 or 6 MW, and the Eurostar e300 uses more than 12 MW. Power stations add a notation of their own: MWe refers to the electrical output of a generator, while MWt refers to thermal output. Argentina's Embalse plant, for example, generates 2,109 MWt of heat, which drives a turbine producing 648 MWe of electricity.

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

Sources: Wikipedia: Watt (megawatt section); Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (power)

Related conversions

See all power units.