Database Of Coal-Fired Power Plants Worldwide Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

There is exactly one source built to answer that question at unit grain: the Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT) from Global Energy Monitor. It inventories every coal-fired generating unit of 30 MW and larger - 14,674 units across 111 countries - carrying status, capacity, owner and parent company, coordinates and a per-unit CO2 estimate, with more than 3,000 distinct plant owners attached. Datadory scores it 10 out of 10, making it the only quality-score-10 source among the 17 primary Coal & Consumable Fuels datasets; across Datadory's whole 1,744-dataset catalog, just 145 records reach a 10.

Four kinds of source cover the worldwide coal-plant question between them, and they substitute for each other less than their marketing suggests. The ranked comparison below sorts them by how directly they answer "which plants exist." GCPT wins on grain and openness; the World Bank platform wins on breadth of publishers; urgewald wins on who stands behind each asset; official statistics win on what the assets burn.

The runner-up tier deserves one caveat. The World Bank Energy Data Portal (energydata.info) pools 1,191 energy datasets from 31 partner organizations across 193 countries on a CKAN platform, mostly under commercial delivery terms 4.0, and includes coal-relevant power plant inventories and extractive-industry layers - but coverage is per-dataset and uneven, so it complements rather than replaces a dedicated census. Company ownership screening belongs to urgewald's Global Coal Exit List (GCEL), whose roughly 3,000 parent and subsidiary companies carry headquarters in more than 80 countries and expansion flags refreshed each fourth quarter in the annual edition (GCEL 2025 is current).

The tracker counts and locates boilers; it does not measure what flows through them. Fuel consumption, generation output and prices live in four statistical systems, each anchoring a different geography.

India is the special case: the Ministry of Coal - India Coal Statistics publishes a 21-page Monthly Statistics at a Glance, the National Coal Index and the National Coal Portal dashboard without registration, with the latest verified monthly release provisionally covering June 2026.

Pin the release label to the extract first: record "July 2026" beside any unit, megawatt or country total you compute, because quarterly revisions move the numbers and an uncited count cannot be reproduced. State the 30 MW threshold and the coverage windows - proposals since 2010, retirements since 2000 - in your methodology note, since both define what the denominator excludes.

Decide whether you are counting units or stations before comparing against anything else: the tracker's native grain is the generating unit, and its plant, country and region rollups collapse multi-unit sites differently from national registers. Cross-check the macro picture against official statistics - US fundamentals sit in EIA Annual Coal Report (ACR) and the EIA Coal Data service, Europe's balance in Eurostat's 44 geographies, and country-year production and trade in UNdata's roughly 200 areas. Where the trade-off between the NGO census and the federal view needs spelling out, the vs EIA Annual Coal Report (ACR) comparison lays it side by side.