terawatt en · NOUN
Etymology
From tera- + watt.
Meanings
-
One million million (10¹²) watts, an amount of power large enough to power an entire region with many cities. (Consuming 1 terawatt during a duration of 1 hour consumes 1 terawatt-hour of energy.).
As of 2025, it was estimated that all of the power stations on Earth were collectively generating about 15 terawatts at any given instant.
Meronyms: mW, milliwatt < W, watt < kW, kilowatt < MW, megawatt < GW, gigawatt
If you are about to harvest all the hydropower of the world—this implies the schemes in which all of Greenland has to be engineered for hydropower—you have a total of something like 2.9 terawatts. If you go to large scale deployment of wind power facilities, the upper limit is 1, 2, or 3 terawatts. Tidal power for .04, wave power, if you want to have 1 terawatt, you have to provide a linear facility almost of the length of the perimeter of the earth. Ocean thermal gradient within ten kilometers of the coast line—.35 terawatts. Therefore, the renewable resources all have a similar thing in common: namely to be on the scale of 1 terawatt but not dozens of terawatts. That is the message. Energy conservation can bring you 1 terawatt and it falls in line with the soft options, but not dozens of terawatts. So what do you do then when dozens of terawatts are at stake? Fortunately there is more than one option to provide, but they all have their problems.
1977, United States House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology, quoting Wolf Haefele, European Oversight Trip: Report of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-fifth Congress, First Session. Serial D, U.S. Government Printing Office, page 24:Holonyms: PW, petawatt
Forms
| Spelling | Features | Labels | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| terawatts | Number=Plur | lexicographic | |
| tera-watt | alternative | lexicographic |
Deriveds
Relateds
Translations (5)
nl terawatt (one million million ( 1012 ) watts, abbreviated as TW) · cs terawatt (one million million ( 1012 ) watts, abbreviated as TW) · fr térawatt (one million million ( 1012 ) watts, abbreviated as TW) · de Terawatt (one million million ( 1012 ) watts, abbreviated as TW) · fi terawatti (one million million ( 1012 ) watts, abbreviated as TW)