What unit would you use to express a very high electrical load like a city power plant?

In the context of expressing very high electrical loads, such as those encountered in a city power plant, using megawatts is common; however, for extraordinarily large electrical outputs, gigawatts becomes the more appropriate unit. A gigawatt is equivalent to one billion watts (1,000 megawatts), which aligns with the substantial energy requirements of a city power plant, especially in metropolitan areas where energy demand is significantly high.

This unit allows for a more manageable way to represent large figures without resorting to unwieldy numbers. For comparison, while a kilowatt denotes a much smaller load (one thousand watts) and a megawatt denotes one million watts, the gigawatt is better suited to express the capacity of larger facilities that need to provide significant power to urban populations. Terawatts, which represent one trillion watts, are generally used for even more massive scales of power generation not typically encountered in city power plants.

As such, when discussing high electrical loads on the scale of a city power plant, gigawatts offer a precise and practical way to communicate the necessary energy output.