Around the world, there are about 62,500 power plants operating today. That includes everything from coal-fired plants to hydroelectric dams to wind farms.
But where are all these plants? And who uses what? This nifty map from a recent GE report offers a nice visualization:
A couple of footnotes and caveats here:
— This map offers a good way of visualizing where different types power plants are, but it doesn’t necessarily show how important each source of electricity is. For instance, the map rightly shows that the German countryside is now blanketed with solar and wind farms. But Germany still gets less electricity from renewable sources (about 25 percent) than it does from coal or even natural gas.
— For a better look at the importance of different energy sources, take a look at this interactive chart from Nature, which shows who consumes what. The data there jibes with some aspects of this map (Brazil really is massively dependent on hydropower). But as the Nature data shows, coal power is still far more important to countries like the United States and China than would appear from the map above.
washingtonpost
