Scale kilowatts up to gigawatts for generation fleets, grid studies and national energy figures.
Starting from an apparent-power rating instead? Use the main kVA to kW converter for any power factor.
Every diagram and table on this page updates with the calculator above.
One gigawatt is 1,000 MW, or a million kilowatts.
Gigawatts describe generation fleets and national demand rather than individual equipment. If you are using this conversion on a single machine, something has probably gone wrong by a factor of a thousand.
Each step on this scale is a thousandfold. A large wind turbine is a few megawatts, a big gas plant several hundred, and a nuclear station a few gigawatts.
| Plant type | Typical unit size | Capacity factor |
|---|---|---|
| Rooftop solar array | 5 – 20 kW | 10 – 20% |
| Onshore wind turbine | 3 – 5 MW | 25 – 35% |
| Offshore wind turbine | 8 – 15 MW | 40 – 55% |
| Gas turbine (CCGT) | 400 – 900 MW | 40 – 60% |
| Nuclear reactor | 1 – 1.6 GW | 85 – 95% |
Capacity factor is the share of nameplate output actually delivered over a year.
This is why a headline gigawatt figure rarely means what it appears to. A 1 GW wind farm and a 1 GW nuclear station have the same nameplate and very different annual output.
| kW | Power (GW) | Power (MW) |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 kW | 0.001 | 1 |
| 5,000 kW | 0.005 | 5 |
| 10,000 kW | 0.01 | 10 |
| 50,000 kW | 0.05 | 50 |
| 100,000 kW | 0.1 | 100 |
| 250,000 kW | 0.25 | 250 |
| 500,000 kW | 0.5 | 500 |
| 750,000 kW | 0.75 | 750 |
| 1,000,000 kW | 1 | 1,000 |
| 1,500,000 kW | 1.5 | 1,500 |
| 2,000,000 kW | 2 | 2,000 |
| 3,000,000 kW | 3 | 3,000 |
| 5,000,000 kW | 5 | 5,000 |
At a rough average household demand of 1.2 kW, one gigawatt covers something like 800,000 homes. It is a useful sanity check on press releases, but treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a number.
Note: Household estimate uses 1.2 kW average continuous demand.
Capacity is a rate; energy is capacity multiplied by the hours it actually runs. Two projects with identical nameplates can differ threefold in annual output.
The nuclear station delivers roughly 2.6 times the energy from the same headline figure.
One is capacity, the other energy. Reporting confuses them constantly, and the difference is a factor of thousands.
Nameplate output is an upper bound reached only in ideal conditions.
Usually based on average demand, which hides the peak the grid must actually meet.
29 calculators built on the same maths as the tool above. Each one has its own inputs, interactive diagrams and worked examples.
Common questions about converting kw to gw.