megawatt

plural megawatts · alternative mega-watt

1. One million (1 000 000) watts, an amount of power large enough to power such things as an entire commercial building or a small passenger aircraft. (Consuming 1 megawatt during a duration of 1 hour consumes 1 megawatt-hour of energy.)

   Meronyms: mW, milliwatt < W, watt < kW, kilowatt

   4 more examples

   Holonyms: GW, gigawatt < TW, terawatt < PW, petawatt

   Not long after the feds started regulating radio, Mexico's megawatt border blasters—high-powered stations planted just south of Texas and California—started beckoning. The FCC couldn't control them […]

   2004, Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, page 197

   SAN FRANCISCO, July 23 — Pacific Gas & Electric, Northern California’s major utility, is announcing a commitment on Wednesday to purchase 550 megawatts of solar power to be generated by troughlike arrays of mirrors spread over nine square miles in the Mojave Desert.

   2007 July 25, Felicity Barringer, “California Utility Agrees to Buy Power Generated by Solar Array”, in The New York Times

   In theory, the GERD could boost the region's economy [Horn of Africa and eastern North Africa]. At full capacity, it could generate close to 6,000 megawatts of electricity, double Ethiopia's entire output before the dam was built. Currently, just over 22% of the country's 122m people are connected to the grid. The dam could supply millions more with power, both in Ethiopia and through power deals with neighbouring countries. […] That will happen only if Ethiopia builds better transmission lines to connect more people to the grid and to send more power to its neighbours. At the moment the main beneficiaries of the power surplus generated by the dam are miners of cryptocurrencies. […] Their data centres, which have their own power lines, are expected to consume nearly a third of the country's electricity this year. Meanwhile, most electricity-deprived Ethiopians will probably have to wait years for their grid connection. At the current pace of expansion, the national power company expects just 27% of households to be connected by 2030, far off the national target of 96%.

   2025 September 8, “The promise and peril of Ethiopia's new mega-dam: It could power the region or plunge it into another conflict”, in The Economist

comparative more megawatt · superlative most megawatt · alternative mega-watt

1. figurativelyExceptionally powerful, intense, or enormous in impact.

   I also love the way you always greet me with a megawatt smile.

   2008, David Foster, Hitman, Forty Years Making Music, Topping the Charts, and Winning Grammys

   3 more examples

   It has been nearly 30 years since Warren's first major hit, Laura Branigan's “Solitaire,” and her mega-watt success has seldom dimmed.

   2011, Melinda Newman, “A Hitmaker Reaches New Heights”, in Billboard, volume 123, number 35, page 29

   Thanks to Parker's megawatt success in the NBA, kids in France began to dream of being like him and pursuing their own hoops dreams, which started to change the tenor of the game back home.

   2023, Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, Basketball Empire, France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA, page 212

   As the opening riffs of megawatt single ‘Nice To Each Other’ kick in, the curtains open, revealing [Olivia] Dean in a sequinned pink gown, flanked by a slick band.

   2026 April 23, Hannah Mylrea, “Olivia Dean live in Glasgow: a new popstar’s victory lap”, in NME