Power Atlas

The problem

A count is not capacity

A map of the world’s power plants looks simple: one open file, one dot per plant. Reading it right is where the time goes. The file stopped in 2021, so recent solar and wind is missing; the fuel with the most plants is not the fuel with the most capacity; and half the records have no commissioning year at all.

Watch it work

Episode 12 — Power Atlas (5:29)

One public source end to end: where the power plant data lives, the three details that cost the most time, and the map and globe it turns into.

What it covers

One source, three details, one map

• The source: the Global Power Plant Database from the World Resources Institute. It is one file with one row per plant — a name, a country, a capacity in megawatts, a primary fuel, coordinates and a commissioning year — under CC BY 4.0, so any use must credit the World Resources Institute. Power Atlas ships the file with the app, so it makes no live data requests.
• Detail one, the database stopped in 2021: version 1.3.0, released in June 2021, is the final release, and the Institute states that the project is not maintained and that no updates are planned. The newest commissioning year in the file is 2020, so the solar and wind capacity built since then is not on the map. The Power Atlas footer says so: final release June 2021, no longer updated.
• Detail two, a count of plants is not a count of capacity: solar has 10,665 plants, 30.5% of the count, but 3.3% of the capacity; coal has 2,330 plants, 6.7% of the count, and 34.4% of the capacity, the largest share of any fuel. The average solar plant in the file is 18 megawatts and the average coal plant 844. The energy mix panel switches between megawatts and plant count, and the 27% renewables share is a share of listed capacity, not of electricity generated.
• Detail three, half the plants have no commissioning year: 17,489 of the 34,936 records leave it blank, 7,165 of them solar plants, and even the second largest plant, the 13.1 gigawatt Baihetan Dam in China, has none. So Power Atlas does not filter or color the plants by age, and the plant card shows the commissioning year only when the record has one.
• How it becomes a map: each plant is a dot colored by its primary fuel — the database lists 15 fuels and the app folds the smallest into Other, for 12 colors — and dot size follows the square root of capacity, so the area of a dot tracks megawatts. Fuel chips switch fuels on and off and show their plant counts; capacity buttons keep plants of 100 MW, 500 MW or 1 GW and up; a country search narrows the map and the energy mix to one country; the Giants list flies to the 12 largest plants, led by Three Gorges Dam at 22.5 gigawatts; two buttons show only the renewable or only the fossil plants; and on the 3D globe each plant stands as a column whose height follows the square root of capacity, a 1 gigawatt plant about 57 kilometers tall.

What it does not do

• Not a live registry — the file is the final June 2021 release; plants built or retired since then are not reflected.
• Not electricity generated — every share is a share of listed capacity, not of the power the plants produced.
• Not every plant on Earth — the database is comprehensive, not complete.

Where the data comes from

Every source in the episode

• Global Power Plant Database, World Resources Institute — datasets.wri.org/datasets/global-power-plant-database
• Global Power Plant Database on GitHub, v1.3.0 README and methods — github.com/wri/global-power-plant-database
• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) — creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Source sheet with every endpoint — allthingsspatial.io/pages/sources.html

The data is credited to the World Resources Institute. The credit sits in the Power Atlas footer, together with the release date and the note that the database is no longer updated.