Title: Global Power Plant Database

Description: A comprehensive, global, open source database of power plants

Version: 1.2.0
Release Date: 2019-06-12
URI: http://datasets.wri.org/dataset/globalpowerplantdatabase
Copyright: Copyright 2018-2019 World Resources Institute and Data Contributors
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International -- CC BY 4.0
Contact: powerexplorer@wri.org
Citation: Global Energy Observatory, Google, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in
Stockholm, Enipedia, World Resources Institute. 2019. Global Power Plant Database.
Published on Resource Watch and Google Earth Engine. http://resourcewatch.org/
https://earthengine.google.com/

Abstract:

An affordable, reliable, and environmentally sustainable power sector is central to

modern society.
Governments, utilities, and companies make decisions that both affect and depend on
the power sector.
For example, if governments apply a carbon price to electricity generation, it
changes how plants run and which plants are built over time.
On the other hand, each new plant affects the electricity generation mix, the
reliability of the system, and system emissions.
Plants also have significant impact on climate change, through carbon dioxide (CO2)
emissions; on water stress, through water withdrawal and consumption; and on air
quality, through sulfur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and particulate matter
(PM) emissions.

The Global Power Plant Database is an open-source open-access dataset of grid-scale

(1 MW and greater) electricity generating facilities operating across the world.

The Database currently contains nearly 30000 power plants in 164 countries,
representing about 82% of the world's capacity.
Entries are at the facility level only, generally defined as a single transmission
grid connection point.
Generation unit-level information is not currently available.
The methodology for the dataset creation is given in the World Resources Institute
publication "A Global Database of Power Plants" [0].
Associated code for the creation of the dataset can be found on GitHub [1].

To stay updated with news about the project and future database releases, please
sign up for our newsletter for the release announcement [2].

[0] www.wri.org/publication/global-power-plant-database
[1] https://github.com/wri/global-power-plant-database
[2] https://goo.gl/ivTvkd

Package Description:

The Global Power Plant Database is available in an archived directory of 4 files.

- `global_power_plant_database.csv`: The core dataset of the world's power
plants, released as a comma-delimited plain text file.
- `RELEASE_NOTES.txt`: Information on the changes and history between
database versions.
- `README.txt`: This file, the metadata document.
- `A_Global_Database_of_Power_Plants.pdf`: The WRI Technical Note describing
the database development.

File Description [global_power_plant_database.csv]

This file is a CSV with the following conventions:

- file encoding: UTF-8
- field delimiter: , (comma; 0x2C)
- line terminator: \r\n (CRLF) (carriage-return line-feed; 0x0D 0x0A)
- header line: true
- field quoting: Only in instances where a double-quote (0x22) is contained
within a text field; in which case the double-quote is escaped by a double-quote as
in RFC 4180 2.7 [4].

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180#section-2

Fields:

- `country` (text): 3 character country code corresponding to the ISO 3166-1

alpha-3 specification [4]
- `country_long` (text): longer form of the country designation
- `name` (text): name or title of the power plant, generally in Romanized
form
- `gppd_idnr` (text): 10 or 12 character identifier for the power plant
- `capacity_mw` (number): electrical generating capacity in megawatts
- `latitude` (number): geolocation in decimal degrees; WGS84 (EPSG:4326)
- `longitude` (number): geolocation in decimal degrees; WGS84 (EPSG:4326)
- `primary_fuel` (text): energy source used in primary electricity generation
or export
- `other_fuel1` (text): energy source used in electricity generation or
export
- `other_fuel2` (text): energy source used in electricity generation or
export
- `other_fuel3` (text): energy source used in electricity generation or
export
- `commissioning_year` (number): year of plant operation, weighted by unit-
capacity when data is available
- `owner` (text): majority shareholder of the power plant, generally in
Romanized form
- `source` (text): entity reporting the data; could be an organization,
report, or document, generally in Romanized form
- `url` (text): web document corresponding to the `source` field
- `geolocation_source` (text): attribution for geolocation information
- `wepp_id` (text): a reference to a unique plant identifier in the widely-
used PLATTS-WEPP datase
- `year_of_capacity_data` (number): year the capacity information was
reported
- `generation_gwh_2013` (number): electricity generation in gigawatt-hours
reported for the year 2013
- `generation_gwh_2014` (number): electricity generation in gigawatt-hours
reported for the year 2014
- `generation_gwh_2015` (number): electricity generation in gigawatt-hours
reported for the year 2015
- `generation_gwh_2016` (number): electricity generation in gigawatt-hours
reported for the year 2016
- `generation_gwh_2017` (number): electricity generation in gigawatt-hours
reported for the year 2017
 - `estimated_generation_gwh` (number): estimated annual electricity
generation in gigawatt-hours for the year 2014 (see [0])

[4] https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html

Caveats:

`primary_fuel` is the fuel that has been identified to provide the largest portion
of generated electricity for the plant or has been identified as the primary fuel
by the data source..
For power plants that have data in multiple `other_fuel` fields, the ordering of
the fuels should not be taken to indicate any priority or preference of the fuel
for operating the power plant or generating units.
Though the `other_fuel` columns in the database are numbered sequentially from 1,
the ordering is insignificant.

Generation is provided at the year scale for the years 2013-2017.

The generation values may correspond to a calendar year or a fiscal/regulatory
year; no distinction is provided in the database.

Updates:

Contributions, suggestions, and corrections to the database are highly encouraged.

The proper channels for contributions are through opening a GitHub issue for the
Global Power Plant Database [1] or by email [5].

[5] powerexplorer@wri.org