Open power plant database as part of Power Explorer project - updates and questions on estimating generation

Dear OpenMod folks,

Hope all is well. I wanted to give you a quick update on our data research related to the Power Explorer project and see if you can give advice on our upcoming research as the modeling community is one of our target audiences for this data.

As you might know, last year we published the Global Power Plant Database, a comprehensive, open source database of power plants around the world (covering all fuel types). We will have an update out in the next weeks that increase geolocated plants to over 30,000+ and coverage to 85% by global installed capacity.

Our main goal in the coming months will be to improve estimation of annual generation on plant level (starting with one target year) where public data is not reported as well as estimating plant level CO2 emissions. We hope that this will improve the utility of the data for the research community as well as for our future work. We are aiming to create separate models for each of the dominant fuel type (Wind, Solar, Coal, Gas, Hydro, Oil), since the drivers of generation vary widely across fuel types. We have reviewed existing approaches and summarized our present strategies by fuel type in this document.

While we have tried to capture existing research, I am sure we might have missed some existing approaches. We were also wondering if you have done similar research, plan to do similar research or know of anyone else doing similar work?

Any other thoughts or feedback is also welcome!

All the best,
Johannes

Johannes Friedrich
Senior Associate
World Resources Institute

1 Like

Ping. Just pushing this up.

Just checking if anyone is working on similar issues.

We also heard form some folks that are working on estimating water withdraws and air pollution emissions and are aiming to include this information where openly available.

Hope we can continue to help this community with open data!

Johannes