How Much Natural Gas Does a 1-GW Data Center Need?

A continuously operating 1-GW electrical load consumes 8.76 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. How much natural gas is required to generate that electricity depends on the efficiency—or heat rate—of the generating technology.

EIA reports a 2024 average tested heat rate of 7,548 Btu/kWh for natural-gas combined-cycle units and 10,999 Btu/kWh for gas turbines. Applied to 8.76 TWh of annual generation, those heat rates imply roughly 66 trillion Btu for combined cycle and roughly 96 trillion Btu for gas turbines before converting the energy content into a physical gas volume.

That is why a single universal gas-volume number can be misleading. Modern combined-cycle plants generally use substantially less fuel per kilowatt-hour than simple-cycle gas turbines. A data-center project's actual gas demand also depends on utilization, outages, ambient conditions, and whether gas generation supplies the full load continuously or only part of it.