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A date most movie buffs know by heart, October 21, 2015, is the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel in “Back to the Future Part II.”
Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation
A date most movie buffs know by heart, October 21, 2015, is the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to the future in Steven Spielberg’s 1989 classic “Back to the Future Part II.”
Although you may not have remembered the date, you’ve probably heard of Doc’s DeLorean, which takes 1.21 gigawatts (GW) of power to travel through time. Admittedly, our national labs haven’t quite figured out time travel just yet, but they do analyze power.
For instance, at the end of 2023, there were over 150.5 GW of wind power and 137.5 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) total in the United States. To help put this number in perspective, it’s important to know just how big 1 GW is. A watt is a measure of power and there are 1 billion watts in 1 GW. (And if you wanted to break it down even further, 1 million watts = 1 megawatt [MW] and 1,000 watts = 1 kilowatt [kW].)
Need a stronger visual? Here are seven examples equal to 1 GW of power:
Based on a representative bifacial module of 530 watts. (Source)
Based on the average utility-scale land-based wind turbine size of 3.4 MW installed in the United States in 2023. (Source)
Based on the average offshore wind turbine size of 9.7 MW installed globally in 2023. (Source)
Based on typical performance, a light-emitting diode (LED) A19 lamp is roughly 92 lumens per watt and consumes about 10 watts. (Source)
Based on horsepower to watts conversion: 746 watts = 1 horsepower. (source)
Based on the Existing Hydropower Assets Database from Oak Ridge National Laboratory that says the dam generates approximately 2 GW of power.
According to the automaker’s website, the Chevy Corvette Z06 engine delivers 670 horsepower. Two-thousand of those engines would equal 1.34 million horsepower, or 1 GW. (Source)
According to the automaker’s website, the Chevy Corvette Z06 engine delivers 670 horsepower. Two-thousand of those engines would equal 1.34 million horsepower, or 1 GW. 
According to the automaker’s website, the Tesla Model 3 has a peak power of 510 horsepower. It would take over 2,000 of those engines, working at their peak, to reach 1.34 million horsepower, or 1 GW.
This blog post was originally published in 2015 and has been updated. 
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