Carbon Brief reported in mid-2020 that since 2000, the world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity to around 2,045 gigawatts (GW) after explosive growth in China and India. A further 200 GW is being built and 300 GW is planned. More recently, 268 GW has closed due to a wave of retirements across the EU and US. Combined with a rapid slowdown in the number of new plants being built, this means the number of coal units operating around the world fell for the first time in 2018, Carbon Brief analysis suggests.
Another 213 GW is already set to retire and 19 of the world’s 80 coal-powered countries plan a complete phaseout of the fuel, including the UK and Germany. Meanwhile, electricity generated from coal has plateaued since 2014, so the expanding fleet is running fewer hours. This erodes coal’s bottom line, as does competition from other fuels. It would now be cheaper to build new wind and solar than to keep running half of existing coal plants. The way coal’s next chapter unfolds is key to tackling climate change. Global unabated coal use must fall by around 80% this decade if warming is to be limited to less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to recent Carbon Brief analysis.
To shed light on this story, Carbon Brief has mapped the past, present and future of all the world’s coal-fired power stations. The interactive timeline map, above, shows the plants operating in each year between 2000 and 2019, as well as the location of planned new capacity.
This map has been fully updated since it was originally published in 2018, using the latest data from the Global Energy Monitor (formerly CoalSwarm) Global Coal Plant Tracker. It features around 10,000 retired, operating and planned coal units, totaling around 3,000 gigawatts (GW) across 99 countries. The 2018 and 2019 versions of this article have been archived.
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