Kilowatts to Gigawatts (kW to GW)

1 kilowatt equals 0.000001 gigawatts exactly.

How to convert kilowatts to gigawatts

To convert kilowatts to gigawatts, multiply the number of kilowatts by 0.000001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply gigawatts by 1,000,000.

gigawatts = kilowatts × 0.000001

Example: 10 kilowatts = 0.00001 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

Kilowatt (kW)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 watts. Used for the power of motors, cars and household appliances.

A kilowatt is simply the watt with the SI prefix kilo, meaning a thousand, attached. The watt was adopted into the SI in 1960 and is small next to machinery, since an incandescent night light uses about 4 W, so the thousand-watt multiple suits engines, electric motors, tools and heaters. For readers used to older units, one kilowatt is roughly 1.34 horsepower.

Small electric heaters with a single element can use about 1 kW, and a domestic electric kettle or microwave oven draws a similar amount. The average household in the United States uses about 1 kW of electric power over time. On a clear midday near the equator, a square meter of Earth's surface receives about 1 kW of sunlight. Do not confuse the kilowatt with the kilowatt-hour on an electricity bill: the first is a rate, the second is the energy used by running one kilowatt for an hour, which equals 3,600,000 watt-seconds.

1 kilowatt = 1,000 watts (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilowatt; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (power); BIPM: SI prefixes

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.