Every Power Plant on Earth

What the colours mean

Each plant is tinted by its primary fuel and sized by its capacity in megawatts, so a giant coal or nuclear station reads large and a small solar plant reads small. When plants cluster, the cluster takes the colour of the fuel that generates the most powerinside it — so a region runs by what actually drives its grid, not by whichever fuel simply has the most sites.

How each of these fuels is actually turned into electricity — what a turbine does, why some plants run constantly and others only when the wind blows or the sun shines — is worth a couple of minutes:

Power plants by country

Where the world’s generating capacity sits — led by the largest economies and their enormous fleets. Open a country for its fuel mix and its biggest stations.

About this data

Plants, their locations, fuels and capacities come from the Global Power Plant Database, compiled by the World Resources Institute and partners and released under a CC BY 4.0 licence. We map every plant that has real coordinates, colour it by its primary fuel and size it by its installed capacity in megawatts. Commissioning years, where recorded, appear in each marker’s popup. The database is a periodic compilation rather than a live feed, so very new plants — especially the recent surge in solar and wind — may be under-counted, and distributed rooftop solar is largely outside its scope. We show capacity (what a plant canproduce), not live output. This is a map of where the world’s generating stations are and what they burn, not a definitive ranking; we refresh the snapshot periodically rather than calling the source on every visit.