Convert BTU to kWh British thermal units ↔ kilowatt hours Free Online Secure
Type a value in British thermal units and read it in kilowatt hours at once. The factor is exact by definition, the arithmetic happens in your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere.
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Common values — Convert BTU to kWh (British thermal units ↔ kilowatt hours)
| BTU | kWh |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0.000293071070172 |
| 2 | 0.000586142140344 |
| 3 | 0.000879213210517 |
| 5 | 0.00146535535086 |
| 10 | 0.00293071070172 |
| 20 | 0.00586142140344 |
| 50 | 0.0146535535086 |
| 100 | 0.0293071070172 |
Where these units come from
Energy collected a unit from every field that discovered it separately. The joule is the SI one and the plainest: a newton acting over a metre. The calorie came from the study of heat and was defined by warming water one degree — which is why there are several of them, depending on which degree you start from; the thermochemical calorie, exactly 4.184 J, is the one used here. The kilowatt hour is not a physicist's unit at all but an accountant's: a kilowatt drawn for an hour, which is how electricity is sold. The BTU is its British cousin, built from the pound and the Fahrenheit degree, and it still runs the heating and cooling trade worldwide.
Where you meet them
Joules belong to physics and to food labels outside the English-speaking world. Kilowatt hours arrive on every electricity bill and describe the capacity of batteries, from a phone to a car. BTUs rate air conditioners, boilers and gas appliances almost everywhere, including in countries that are otherwise entirely metric. Calories — in practice kilocalories — rule nutrition, which is the one place where the unit's name is routinely a thousand times out.
Questions people ask
Which BTU does this page use?
The international-table BTU, exactly 1055.05585262 joules. Several others exist and differ in the fourth digit, so figures from different sources can disagree slightly. A BTU is roughly the heat needed to warm a pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, and air conditioners are rated in BTU per hour: 12,000 of them is about 3.5 kilowatts.
Why is a kilowatt hour not just a kilowatt?
Because one is a rate and the other is an amount. A kilowatt is how fast energy flows — a kettle draws about two of them. A kilowatt hour is what you get if that flow continues for an hour, and it is what the meter counts and the bill charges for. Running a 2 kW kettle for six minutes uses 0.2 kWh; running a 10 W lamp all day uses about the same.
Is the answer exact?
Where both units are defined in terms of one another by whole numbers, yes — the page says so above the figure, and the only rounding is in how many digits are shown. Where the ratio has no finite decimal, the page shows twelve significant digits and says the relation is approximate rather than pretending otherwise.
Does anything I type leave my device?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded and there is no server to upload it to. Load the page once and it keeps working with the network switched off.
BTU to kilowatt-hours: reading national energy statistics and fuel prices
Government energy tables in the United States are written in quadrillions of BTU, gas traders quote dollars per million BTU, and utility reports count trillions of BTU delivered to each sector. Anyone outside America who wants to compare those numbers with a European grid statistic, an Australian tariff or a Canadian provincial report must turn BTU into kilowatt-hours first. To convert BTU to kWh, multiply by 0.000293: 1,000 BTU is 0.293 kWh, a therm (100,000 BTU) is 29.3 kWh and one MMBtu (1,000,000 BTU) is 293 kWh. The calculator above multiplies as you type, and the sections that follow show how such figures look in real tables, from one shipload of liquefied gas to an entire country.
Below you will find the rule with examples, short notes on both units, a side-by-side look and a long series of statistical, industrial and household cases, ending with the slips people make most. Everything is computed locally in the page. For official reporting, use whatever conversion factors the publishing agency prescribes.
How to convert BTU to kWh: multiply by 0.000293
The rule
A BTU equals 1,055.06 joules and a kWh equals 3,600,000 joules, which makes one BTU 0.000293071 kWh. For a “convert BTU to kWh” calculation, take the BTU figure times 0.000293: 5,000 BTU gives 1.47 kWh, 80,000 BTU gives 23.4 kWh and 3 million BTU gives 879 kWh. To go the other way, multiply kWh by 3,412.
Worked examples
A gas range burner rated at 15,000 BTU/h draws 4.4 kW. A clothes dryer burning 22,000 BTU/h is the same as 6.45 kW. A household that the 2020 residential survey puts at 66 MMBtu a year has used about 19,300 kWh.
Why the factor never changes
The factor comes straight from how the joule, the BTU and the kWh are defined, so nothing is rounded inside it. Tables print 0.000293 or 0.00029307, and the gap is far smaller than the precision of any fuel measurement.
A quick sanity test
Expect the kWh result to be about one 3,400th of the BTU figure. A bigger number than you began with means 3,412 was used where 0.000293 belonged.
The BTU
The unit of American energy tables
The British Thermal Unit is the heat that raises one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit, about 1,055 joules. Fuel contents, boiler outputs and national totals are all quoted in it, from a single BTU up to the quad, 1015 BTU.
Where it appears
Fuel tables, gas contracts, furnace labels and federal energy statistics.
The kilowatt-hour
The unit of the meter
A kilowatt-hour is what a one-kilowatt load consumes in an hour, 3.6 megajoules. Nearly every electricity market sells in it, and more and more countries invoice gas in it as well.
Where it appears
Bills, appliance labels, battery capacities and international statistics.
Side by side: BTU and kWh
Expressed in kWh, a quantity of heat looks about 3,400 times smaller than in BTU: 50,000 BTU turns into 14.7 kWh and 2 million BTU into 586 kWh. Both describe identical energy, and only the size of the unit changes.
Nothing is lost in the change. People most often trip over BTU, a quantity, versus BTU per hour, which is a rate.
Where the conversion shows up
Statistics and reports
American agencies publish consumption in quads. One quad is 293 billion kWh, 293 TWh. A state that reports 1,250 trillion BTU of natural gas use in a year has used 366 TWh. A “convert BTU to kWh” calculation is the first step in lining such a table up with a European or Asian one.
Fuel contents
A gallon of gasoline holds about 120,000 BTU, 35.2 kWh. A gallon of diesel holds 138,000 BTU, 40.4 kWh. A barrel of crude oil holds about 5.8 MMBtu, 1,700 kWh, and a short ton of coal around 19 MMBtu, 5,570 kWh.
Gas contracts
A price of $3 per MMBtu is the same as 1.02 US cents per kWh, and $10 per MMBtu is 3.4 cents. Dividing a dollar price by 293 gives dollars per kWh, which is the step needed to compare a US benchmark with a European tariff.
The quad
The quad is 1015 BTU, which is 293 TWh or 1.055 exajoules. The United States used about 94 quads of primary energy in 2023, around 27,500 TWh. The world used roughly 600 exajoules, close to 570 quads, about 167,000 TWh. Such totals mean little until they sit next to a familiar kilowatt-hour figure.
Household surveys
The 2020 residential energy survey gave an average of 66 MMBtu per household for all fuels, about 19,300 kWh. That total includes gas, electricity, oil and propane counted at the point of use. A typical British household uses about 14,000 to 15,000 kWh of gas and electricity together, so the gap is smaller than many expect.
Appliance labels
The yellow EnergyGuide label shows kWh per year, but an older refrigerator brochure may give MMBtu. A refrigerator using 400 kWh a year uses 1.37 MMBtu, 1.37 million BTU. A new label saying 1.0 MMBtu would be 293 kWh. The conversion lets you compare a gas-fired dryer with an electric one.
Boiler horsepower and steam
A boiler horsepower is 33,475 BTU/h, 9.81 kW. A 100-horsepower boiler therefore delivers 3.35 MMBtu of heat each hour, 981 kW. One pound of steam condensing at atmospheric pressure releases 970 BTU, 0.284 kWh, so a load of 1,000 lb/h needs 284 kW of heat, or 355 kW of fuel at 80 per cent efficiency.
Energy per ton in industry
Process industries quote MMBtu per ton. Container glass takes about 3.3 MMBtu per ton, 970 kWh. Cement clinker takes roughly 3.2 MMBtu, 940 kWh, and steel from a blast furnace about 19 MMBtu, 5,550 kWh. A “convert BTU to kWh” calculation lets a plant manager compare these with kWh per tonne in a European benchmark.
Nuclear fuel
Complete fission of one kilogram of uranium-235 releases about 8.2 × 1013 joules, which is 77.7 billion BTU or 22.8 million kWh. A power reactor uses only a few per cent of that in practice, but a few grams still stand for tens of thousands of kWh. Fuel tables with such huge numbers are easiest to read in kWh.
Sunlight in BTU
Full sunshine of 1,000 W/m² delivers about 317 BTU per hour to each square foot. A site receiving 5 kWh/m² a day collects 1,585 BTU per square foot daily. Solar thermal catalogues in America use these figures, while a European installer reads the same sunshine as kilowatt-hours per square metre.
Food Calories and metabolism
A food Calorie, a kilocalorie, equals 3.97 BTU. A diet of 2,500 Calories is 9,920 BTU, 2.9 kWh, a day. A resting adult gives off roughly 80 W, which is 273 BTU per hour. It is why a crowded room warms up: a hundred guests supply nearly 27,000 BTU/h, 8 kW.
The size of one BTU
A wooden kitchen match burns for about as much energy as one BTU, 1,055 joules. Lifting a one-pound weight 778 feet takes the same energy. Spread over the day, a million BTU is about 12.2 kW running continuously, far more than any home appliance and the usual unit of a fuel invoice.
Evaporating maple sap
It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. Boiling off roughly 320 pounds of water, with about 1,150 BTU needed per pound, calls for 370,000 BTU, 108 kWh, even with a perfect evaporator. A “convert BTU to kWh” calculation on that gives producers a way to compare wood, oil and gas arches.
Drying grain
Removing a pound of water from grain takes about 1,800 BTU in a real dryer, which is 0.53 kWh. Drying a tonne of corn from 20 to 15 per cent moisture means removing about 59 kg of water, 130 pounds, so roughly 234,000 BTU, 69 kWh. Farm budgets list the fuel in gallons of propane, 26.8 kWh each.
Exajoules, Mtoe and TWh
International agencies prefer exajoules or million tonnes of oil equivalent. One exajoule is 0.948 quad, 278 TWh. One Mtoe is 39.7 trillion BTU, 11.63 TWh, and one quad is 25.2 Mtoe. A reader moving between an American report and an international one will do a “convert BTU to kWh” calculation and then a second step to the other unit.
Higher and lower heating value
Gas contents are quoted on a higher or lower heating basis. Natural gas has about 1,037 BTU per cubic foot higher, 0.304 kWh, and roughly 934 BTU lower, 0.274 kWh, a difference of 10 per cent. State which basis you used beside any converted result, or a reader may be 10 per cent off.
Gas range and dryer ratings
The burners of a gas range have outputs of 5,000 to 18,000 BTU/h, which is 1.5 to 5.3 kW. A five-burner range could draw 60,000 BTU/h, 17.6 kW, with everything on, though no cook does that. A gas dryer uses 22,000 BTU/h, 6.45 kW, against 5.5 kW for the electric model.
A worked table
An agency table lists residential gas use of 4,980 trillion BTU, commercial use of 3,520 trillion and industrial use of 9,300 trillion. Multiplying each by 0.293 gives 1,459 TWh, 1,031 TWh and 2,725 TWh, a total of 5,217 TWh. Doing the total first gives the same number.
The mental shortcut
To convert BTU to kWh in your head, divide by 3,400 and remove four-tenths of a per cent. For 60,000 BTU: 60,000 / 3,400 = 17.65, less 0.07 is 17.58, against the exact 17.58. For a rough guess, 1,000 BTU is about 0.3 kWh, which is close enough for fuel bills.
Spreadsheet formulas
In a spreadsheet, keep the BTU in column A and use =A2*0.000293071 in column B. For MMBtu in column A, use =A2*293.071. For quads, =A2*293.071 gives TWh. A third column that multiplies the answer by 3,412.14 and compares with column A is a free consistency check.
Rounding in reports
Fuel measurements are accurate to two or three figures, so quote the same in kWh. 1,250 trillion BTU is 366 TWh, not 366.34. A residential gas burner of 15,000 BTU/h is 4.4 kW. If a table is published to the nearest quad, a decimal in the TWh column suggests precision that does not exist.
Landmarks to remember
1,000 BTU is 0.293 kWh. 10,000 BTU is 2.93 kWh. 100,000 BTU is 29.3 kWh. One million BTU is 293 kWh. One billion BTU is 293 MWh. One trillion BTU is 293 GWh. One quad is 293 TWh. With these points almost any mental conversion becomes easy.
Reference ladder
2,000 BTU: 0.586 kWh. 7,500 BTU: 2.20 kWh. 24,000 BTU: 7.03 kWh. 36,000 BTU: 10.55 kWh. 90,000 BTU: 26.4 kWh. 150,000 BTU: 44.0 kWh. 500,000 BTU: 146.5 kWh. A list like this lets you test any calculator output at a glance.
Checking by reversing
To check a “convert BTU to kWh” calculation result, multiply the answer by 3,412 and compare with the starting figure. If 24,000 BTU gave 7.03 kWh, then 7.03 × 3,412 = 23,986, close to 24,000. A second test is the size: the kWh figure must be nearly 3,400 times smaller than the BTU figure.
Two routes to one answer
You can go straight to kWh with 0.000293, or via gigajoules. A million BTU is 1.055 GJ, and a gigajoule is 277.8 kWh, so 1.055 × 277.8 = 293. A thousand MMBtu is about 1,055 GJ. If the two routes differ, a digit was copied wrongly.
US natural gas in BTU
The United States consumes roughly 32 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year. At about 1,037 BTU per cubic foot that is nearly 33 quads, 9,700 TWh. Exports of liquefied gas of 12 billion cubic feet a day amount to 12.4 trillion BTU, 3.6 TWh, every day.
A cargo of liquefied gas
A large LNG carrier loads about 170,000 cubic metres, which holds roughly 3.6 trillion BTU, 3.6 million MMBtu. That equals 1.05 TWh, about the electricity that 250,000 European homes use in a year. Cargoes are priced per MMBtu, so a buyer sees a bill of tens of millions of dollars.
Benchmark prices in cents per kWh
Dividing a price per MMBtu by 293 gives the price per kWh. At $2.50 gas costs 0.85 cents per kWh, at $4 it costs 1.36 cents and at $15 it costs 5.1 cents. A European price of 35 euros per MWh equals 10.26 euros per MMBtu. Use this when you convert BTU to kWh for a price chart in two currencies.
Power plant heat rate
Utilities state a plant's efficiency as a heat rate, BTU of fuel per kWh of electricity. Since 1 kWh is 3,412 BTU, a heat rate of 7,000 means 48.7 per cent efficiency, 6,500 means 52.5 per cent and 10,500 means 32.5 per cent. Modern combined-cycle gas plants run near the first two, and older steam plants near the last.
Carbon per MMBtu
Emission factors are printed per MMBtu. Natural gas gives about 117 lb of carbon dioxide per MMBtu, which is 53 kg, or 0.181 kg per kWh of fuel heat. Gasoline gives 157 lb, 0.242 kg per kWh, and bituminous coal about 206 lb, 0.319 kg per kWh. A “convert BTU to kWh” calculation puts these on the same basis as a European inventory.
Electric cars and gasoline equivalents
The US Environmental Protection Agency counts 33.7 kWh, about 115,000 BTU, as one gallon of gasoline equivalent. A car that travels 3.3 miles on a kWh therefore rates 111 miles per gallon equivalent. In BTU terms a car using 0.30 kWh per mile needs about 1,024 BTU for each mile.
Building energy intensity
American building benchmarks use kBtu per square foot per year. One kBtu per square foot is 3.155 kWh per square metre. An office at 80 kBtu/ft² uses 252 kWh/m², while a passive-house standard of 15 kWh/m² for heating equals 4.8 kBtu/ft². Switching units shows the size of the gap.
More values for convert BTU to kWh
A longer list of conversions
If the value you need is not in the first list, these further conversions may be close enough to read off directly:
- 0.1 BTU = 0.0000293071 kWh
- 0.5 BTU = 0.000146536 kWh
- 3 BTU = 0.000879213 kWh
- 4 BTU = 0.00117228 kWh
- 7 BTU = 0.0020515 kWh
- 15 BTU = 0.00439607 kWh
- 20 BTU = 0.00586142 kWh
- 75 BTU = 0.0219803 kWh
- 200 BTU = 0.0586142 kWh
- 500 BTU = 0.146536 kWh
- 2,000 BTU = 0.586142 kWh
- 10,000 BTU = 2.93071 kWh
Common slips with a “convert BTU to kWh” calculation
Using the wrong direction
From BTU to kWh the number gets smaller. If 15,000 BTU became more than 50 million, you used the factor for the other direction.
BTU and BTU/h
A burner of 40,000 BTU/h uses 40,000 BTU each hour, which is 11.7 kWh per hour at full output. Run it for three hours and it uses 35 kWh, not 11.7 kWh.
MBtu and MMBtu
Older usage has MBtu for a thousand BTU, using the Roman M, and MMBtu for a million. Some tables say MBtu for a million. Check the heading before multiplying, because the answer can be out by a factor of 1,000.
Quick answers
How do I convert BTU to kWh?
Multiply BTU by 0.000293.
What is 10,000 BTU in kWh?
It is 2.93 kWh.
What is a million BTU in kWh?
It is 293 kWh.
How many BTU make one kWh?
3,412 BTU make one kWh.
Is my number sent anywhere?
No, everything is computed in the browser.
Related pages
Other energy conversions are listed in Convert cal to kWh, Convert J to kWh, Convert kWh to cal, Convert km to mi, Convert mi to km, Convert °C to °F, Convert °F to °C, Convert mi to yd, Convert Pa to bar. Going the other way is covered by Convert kWh to BTU.
To sum up, a “convert BTU to kWh” calculation needs one multiplication by 0.000293 and a unit beside the answer. The figure is worked out on your own device, without registration or upload.