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gigawatt-hour

gigawatt-hour noun: a unit of energy equal to that provided by one gigawatt acting for one hour (3·6 × 10¹² joules).

Noun

gigawatt-hour (plural gigawatt-hours)

  1. A unit of energy equal to that provided by one gigawatt acting for one hour (3·6 × 10¹² joules).
    • Holonyms: megawatt-year (31.536e12 J) < petajoule (1.000e15 J) < terawatt-hour (3.600e15 J) < gigawatt-year (31.536e15 J) < exajoule (1.000e18 J) < petawatt-hour (3.600e18 J) < terawatt-year (31.536e18 J)
    • Meronyms: yoctojoule (1.000e-24 J) < zeptojoule (1.000e-21 J) < attojoule (1.000e-18 J) < hartree (4.35974e-18 J) < femtojoule (1.000e-15 J) < picojoule (1.000e-12 J) < nanojoule (1.000e-9 J) < microjoule (1.000e-6 J) < millijoule (1.000e-3 J) < joule (1 J) < milliwatt-hour (3.6 J) < gram calorie...
  2. (metonymically) A measure of the amount of equipment that produces, consumes, transmits, or stores this amount of energy.
    • Both [solar photovoltaic] panel and battery imports from China [to Pakistan] are on the rise. […] The nation also purchased about 1.25 gigawatt-hours of batteries in 2024 [=1.25 gigawatt-hours' worth of battery capacity], according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. By...2025 October 1, Faseeh Mangi, Tooba Khan, “Pakistan's Solar Boom Faces Ire From Debt-Strapped Government”, in BloombergNEF, archived from the original on 02 Oct 2025
    • China's battery sales surged 49 percent to 786 gigawatt-hours in the first nine months of this year from a year earlier, with exports jumping 33 percent to 129 GWh, according to official figures.2025 November 13, Li Xiuzhong, “Solid-State Batteries May Not Hit Chinese Market Until After 2030, Insiders Say”, in Yicai Global

Forms of gigawatt-hour

pluralgigawatt-hours

Origin of gigawatt-hour

By surface analysis, gigawatt + hour, or, by surface analysis, giga- + watt-hour.

Questions about gigawatt-hour

What does gigawatt-hour mean?
Gigawatt-hour means a unit of energy equal to that provided by one gigawatt acting for one hour (3·6 × 10¹² joules).
What part of speech is gigawatt-hour?
Gigawatt-hour is a noun.
What is the plural of gigawatt-hour?
The plural of gigawatt-hour is gigawatt-hours.

Words near gigawatt-hour in the dictionary

  1. gigawatt
  2. gigawatt hour
  3. gigawatt hours
  4. gigawatt year
  5. gigawatt years
  6. gigawatt-hour
  7. gigawatt-hours
  8. gigawatt-year
  9. gigawatt-years
  10. gigawatts
  11. gigaword

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gigawatt-hour (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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