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Gigawatts is a rate, which gets multiplied by an amount of time to measure an amount of energy.

That's why your energy bill is based on kilowatt-hours. If you have a device that consumes power at a rate of one kilowatt (say a toaster oven) and you run it for one hour, that's one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of energy.



Kilowatt-hours is a pointless unit.

1 Watt (unit of power) is 1 Joule (unit of energy) per second. So "1 Watt-second" is just a needlessly-long way of saying "1 Joule".

Instead of using the idiotic kW-h units, they should just use kJ. (1 kW-h = 3600 kJ or 3.6MJ.)




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