GRID · CARBON INTENSITY
How Clean Is the Grid?
Not all electricity is equal. A unit from a hydro dam or a wind farm carries almost no carbon; the same unit from a coal plant carries a great deal. Carbon intensity measures it — grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour — and on the map the world recolours from green (clean) to red (dirty). For Great Britain it’s live right now; for every other country it’s the latest annual average, and each is badged so you always know which you’re looking at.
From green to red
The world’s grids span a huge range — from under 30 g in countries running on hydro, nuclear or geothermal, to well over 600 g where coal still dominates. The median grid sits near 474 g. Here is how the 212 countries split across the same scale you see on the map.
The cleanest & dirtiest grids
The cleanest grids run on hydropower, nuclear and geothermal; the dirtiest lean on coal and oil — and at the very top, small territories running almost entirely on diesel, where the figure approaches the carbon intensity of the fuel itself. Each is that country’s most recent annual average, rounded.
CLEANEST
DIRTIEST
Live where we can, honest everywhere else
Truly live grid data is published by only a handful of operators. Where it exists and is free to use, we show it live; everywhere else we show the most recent annual average— and we badge every country so the two are never confused.
Half-hourly from NESO, by region. It’s a forecast, so it’s badged est. — and live countries wear a green outline on the map.
Live where their grid operators publish it — the US from EIA-930, ~25 European countries from ENTSO-E. Neither reports a CO₂ number, so each country’s intensity is computed from its live generation mix and badged est. If a feed is briefly unavailable, that country falls back to its annual average.
The most recent annual figure from Ember for each country. Real and sourced — just not minute-by-minute. No-data countries stay grey.
About this data
The annual baseline is Ember’s Yearly Electricity Data (CC BY 4.0), via Our World in Data — 212 countries, each at its most recent reported year (through 2025). These are lifecycle figures: they count the emissions from building and fuelling the power stations, not only what leaves the chimney. The live Great Britain layer is the NESO Carbon Intensity API (CC BY 4.0). We deliberately don’t buy a paid global live feed — the only free global option is licensed for non-commercial use only — which is exactly why most of the map is the honest annual average rather than a real-time number we couldn’t stand behind. Baseline refreshed 2026-06-25.