Megawatt (MW)
One million watts — the standard unit for generating capacity and large facility demand.
A megawatt is a rate, not a quantity; a megawatt-hour is the energy delivered by one megawatt running for an hour. Capacity and consumption are frequently confused in project discussions, and the distinction drives entirely different cost structures.
For scale: a large modern data center campus can be specified in the hundreds of megawatts, which is comparable to the demand of a mid-sized city and explains why these projects are now transmission planning events.
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