The Global Power Plant Database published by WRI and partners provides an open comprehensive dataset of power plants of all fuel types and is activley maintained and updated. More details and additonal regional and global data sources can be found below.
Desired data on power plants
For energy model it is useful to know the following data, in rough order of priority
- Plant primary energy (coal/gas/wind/solar/nuclear/hydro etc.)
- Net electrical output capacity (MW)
- Gross electrical output capacity (MW)
- Operational status (in operation, in planning, out of service, etc.)
- Build date
- Efficiency
- Marginal cost
- CO2 emissions in tonnes CO2 per MWh
- Operator name
- Owner name
- Historical data on output/carbon emissions
- Whether it provides heat output
- If heat output: Thermal output capacity (MWth) and dispatch strategy
- Cooling method
Datasets by region
Global
Power Explorer / Global Power Plant Database
The World Resources Institue and partners have been working since 2015 on Power Explorer, aiming to publish global comprehensive standarized open power system data and activley is looking for contributors.
The Global Power Plant Database is a comprehensive, open source database of power plants around the world. It centralizes power plant data to make it easier to navigate, compare and draw insights for one’s own analysis. Each power plant is geolocated and entries contain information on plant capacity, generation, ownership, and fuel type. As of June 2018, the database includes around 28,500 power plants from 164 countries. It will be continuously updated as data becomes available. The most recent release of the Global Power Plant Database 1.1 includes the addition of two countries (China and Fiji), over 3,000 power plants, and nearly 1300 gigawatts of power capacity. We highly recommend using version 1.1, available online as of June 2018.
The methodology for the dataset creation is given in the World Resources Institute publication "A Global Database of Power Plants"
The database can be visualized on Resource Watchtogether with hundreds of other datasets.
The database is available for immediate download and use through the WRI Open Data Portal.
Associated code for the creation of the dataset can be found on GitHub. The bleeding-edge version of the database (which may contain substantial differences from the release you are viewing) is available on GitHub as well.
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Citation
Global Energy Observatory, Google, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Enipedia, World Resources Institute. 2018. Global Power Plant Database. Published on Resource Watch and Google Earth Engine; http://resourcewatch.org/ https://earthengine.google.com/
WRI is also maintaining a general list of power plant sources in this Google doc: https://goo.gl/1oX71J
Enipedia
http://enipedia.tudelft.nl/wiki/Portal:Power_Plants (dead link)
Enpedia was initially based on CARMA, but also pulls in data from Wikipedia and user entries.
Global Energy Observatory (GEO)
http://globalenergyobservatory.org/
Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA)
http://carma.org/
industryAbout
http://www.industryabout.com/energy
Ventus
http://ventus.project.asu.edu/ (dead link)
OpenStreetMap
The OpenStreetMap project has Tags for power plants
Wikipedia
List of power stations
Europe
ENTSO-E Transparency Platform
ENTSO-E Transparency Platform
All power plants above 100 MW in the ENTSO-E area should be listed, although data is missing from some countries.
Open Power System Data
Open Power System Data has an extensive collection of links to European data sources on power plants as well as datasets on
Bundesnetzagentur for Germany (Germany's Network Regulator)
The German grid regulator "Bundesnetzagentur" (Federal Network Agency) publishes and regularly updates a list of existing power plants feeding into the German grid (including units in Luxemburg, Austria and Switzerland that are connected to the German grid).
In a separate document, also units that are subject to planned decommissioning or new construction are documented (minimum net power generation capacity: 10 MW).
Further description (in German) and download in .xls and .csv format is available here:
External Link (dead link)
UBA Database of German Power Plants
http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/dokument/datenbank-kraftwerke-in-deutschland
All plants above 100MW in Germany
RENPASS
http://renpass.eu/
North-West EU 2020 Model
This is an open access Excel database of a North-West European Power System for a sample year 2020. Data and files were collected and complied by researchers at University College Cork, Ireland.
Simplified Power plant portfolios are contained in the *.rar file below [Master Dataset for Distribution]
An associated functioning PLEXOS model and database for teaching and academic research is also provided. The model and model data should be checked and verified by users before use. This current version has not been validated against historic data.
The PLEXOS model includes hourly wind profiles, demand profiles profiles, simplified power plant data, hourly solar profiles and NTC data for Interconnectors. There is a *.xml file [EU Model Carbon _30] which will function in the PLEXOS for Power Systems Software available from Energy Exemplar.
Any improvements/errors or suggestions on the data or model can be sent to Paul Deane [ jp.deane@ucc.ie]. This is a market model based on freely available data for the year 2020.
Please feel free to use as you wish.
Files may be accessed here
File:Master Dataset for Distribution.rar
ELMOD
Some of ELMOD, particularly for Germany is available (but just replicates the BNetzA list?).
EnergyMap (Germany)
Until 2016, EnergyMap provided data on installed renewable energy power plants in Germany. Evaluations for more recent years cannot be found, with changing legislation in Germany given as reason.
Other lists of datasets
Open Power System Data List of European Network Operator Sites
Many network operators/regulators have online datasets, see the OPSD list of European countries with power plant databases.
List of availability of power plants in Spain and Portugal
The platform contains information about the availability of power plants in Spain and Portugal, as well as if the unavailabilities are planned or unplanned: https://umm.omie.es/electricity
Projects to improve power plant datasets
powerplantmatching (PPM)
A toolset for cleaning, standardizing and combining multiple power plant databases. This package provides ready-to-use power plant data for the European power system. It cleans, standardizes and merges several input databases and creates a new dataset, which includes all the important information. The package allows to easily update the combined data as soon as new input datasets are released.
It is entirely free-and-open-source software (FOSS) and ready-to-download available at GitHub.
The application of the toolset has been broadly tested and peer-reviewed in these two papers here here and here.
Currently, the toolset is constantly being improved, please feel free to get in touch!
Enipedia
Enipedia has a nice list of energy and industry data sets
Enipedia's Elastic Search can search most of the open databases - the challenge is to match the different databases, combine their information and identify missing data (e.g. in the Balkans).
