1 GW Sounds Like Just a Number

One gigawatt is a measure of power. If a facility actually drew 1 GW continuously for all 8,760 hours in a year, it would consume 8.76 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity.

For scale, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that 153.7 TWh of electricity was sold to Ohio customers across all sectors in 2024. A continuous 1-GW load would therefore equal about 5.7% of that annual statewide retail-sales total.

The comparison is a scale illustration, not a forecast that every 1-GW data-center campus will draw its full rated capacity every hour of the year. Actual annual electricity consumption depends on utilization, load variation, efficiency, outages and other operating conditions.

Using EIA's 2024 average Ohio residential consumption of 846 kWh per month, 8.76 TWh is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity purchases of about 863,000 average Ohio residential customers.