Gigawatts to Metric Horsepower (GW to PS)

1 gigawatt equals 1,359,621.617 metric horsepower (rounded).

1 gigawatt = 1,359,621.617 metric horsepower

How to convert gigawatts to metric horsepower

To convert gigawatts to metric horsepower, multiply the number of gigawatts by 1,359,621.617. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply metric horsepower by 7.3549875×10⁻⁷.

metric horsepower = gigawatts × 1,359,621.617

Example: 10 gigawatts = 13,596,216.17 metric horsepower.

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)

Metric Horsepower (PS)

Metric (SI)Current unit

Exactly 735.49875 watts, the power to lift 75 kilograms by one meter in one second. Called PS, CV or pk and used for car engines in Europe and Asia.

Continental Europe built its own horsepower on kilograms and meters instead of pounds and feet. The metric horsepower, written PS from the German Pferdestarke, is the power needed to lift 75 kilograms by one meter in one second, or 75 kilogram-force meters per second. The German standard DIN 66036 gives its value as 735.49875 W, about 98.6 percent of the imperial horsepower. It goes by many local names, among them cv in Italian and Portuguese, pk in Dutch, ch in French and hk in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

It had a French predecessor in the poncelet, a 19th-century unit based on 100 kgf-m/s. In 1972 the European Economic Community replaced PS with the kilowatt as its official unit for power, yet car brochures in many countries still quote PS or its cousins alongside kilowatts. When comparing a European car with an American one, remember that the two horsepowers differ by about 1.4 percent.

1 metric horsepower = 735.49875 watts (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Metric horsepower; Wikipedia: Horsepower

Related conversions

See all power units.