Energy

The world's power stations, largest to smallest

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Tap a fuel to find it in the order.

Every power station in the World Resources Institute's global inventory — 34,936 of them — drawn as one square each, its area exactly proportional to the power the station can produce, laid down largest first. Press play. The first half of the pass places 1,410 stations, 4% of the fleet, and that is already half of all the capacity listed here: dams, nuclear stations and 1,000 MW coal and gas units. What follows gets smaller and far more numerous, until the bottom 9% of the picture is 27,104 stations of under 100 MW. Isolate a fuel to see where it lives in the order: nuclear is 195 squares near the top, solar 10,665 grains near the bottom. This is nameplate capacity — what a station can make flat out, not what it does make. Tap or hover any square.

Data & source

Data: World Resources Institute — Global Power Plant Database v1.3, CC BY 4.0, released 2 June 2021 · fetched —. Scope: 34,936 stations in 167 countries, 5,707 GW of nameplate capacity, as compiled by WRI. Four things this picture is not. It is a snapshot, not a live registry: v1.3 was WRI's final release and the database has not been updated since 2021, so nothing built in the last five years is here and the solar and wind counts are the ones that have moved most since. It is utility-scale: the smallest row in the file is 1 MW, and rooftop solar, small diesel sets and off-grid plant are largely absent — so the real number of power stations on Earth is far larger than this, all of it at the small end. It is capacity, not generation: a 1,000 MW nuclear station runs most of the year and a 1,000 MW solar farm does not, and here they are the same square. And coverage is uneven by country, since WRI assembled it from national registries of differing quality. Capacity is as reported, in the year each source reported it. 17,489 rows carry no commissioning year; those tooltips say so rather than guessing. Squares smaller than one screen pixel are drawn at one pixel so the smallest stations stay visible — below about 10 MW, read the picture as texture rather than counting grains. The table lists all 15 fuels as the database labels them; the plate pools the eight rarest into one neutral colour.