Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT) Data

It is the world's coal-fired power fleet as typed rows instead of a map you have to squint at. The Global Coal Plant Tracker, produced by Global Energy Monitor (GEM), monitors every coal-fired generating unit of 30 MW or more - the operating fleet, units proposed since 2010 and units retired since 2000 - and the July 2026 release carries 14,674 units across 111 countries with more than 3,000 plant owners.

The scale reads plainly in the numbers: roughly 2,200 GW of operating capacity alongside about 760 GW still under development, each unit tracked with its own status rather than rolled into a national total. The architecture is two-level: a structured database row per unit, and a footnoted GEM.wiki page per power station holding project history, financing, environmental impacts and public opposition.

Validation is not a single-source scrape. Figures are checked against government sources such as India's CEA monthly reports and US EIA-860, company reports, news media and local NGOs, then circulated to regional reviewers including CREA, CAN Europe, Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Within Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries, this slice scores 10/10 on our quality rubric.

Exactly as they land after normalization - three of the 14,674 units, chosen because they show three different statuses:

unit-id=G100000113225  status=operating
  name=Huaibei Pingshan power station / Phase II Unit 3
  capacity_MW=1350  start-year=2022
  owner=Huaibei Shenneng Power Generation Co Ltd [100%]
  parent=Shenergy Co Ltd [100.0%]
  country=China  subnational=Anhui  region=Asia
  lat,lon=33.83392,116.831102

unit-id=G100000101858  status=operating
  name=Cumberland Steam Plant / Unit 1
  capacity_MW=1300  start-year=1973
  owner=Tennessee Valley Authority [100%]
  parent=Tennessee Valley Authority [100.0%]
  country=United States  subnational=Tennessee  region=Americas
  lat,lon=36.389947,-87.651636

unit-id=G100000107640  status=cancelled
  name=Ontimavadi power station / (whole-plant record)
  capacity_MW=6300  start-year=-
  owner=GMR Energy Ltd [100%]
  parent=GMR Power and Urban Infra Ltd [69.6%]; GMR Airports Infrastructure Ltd [12.2%]; Claymore Investme...
  country=India  subnational=Andhra Pradesh  region=Asia
  lat,lon=16.945181,82.238647

# shape of the slice
grain=one row per generating unit (>=30 MW)   geography=111 countries
status_enum=announced|pre-permit|permitted|construction|operating|mothballed|shelved|cancelled|retired

Read what those rows already say. Huaibei Pingshan Phase II Unit 3 is a 1,350 MW Chinese unit that entered service in 2022, wholly owned by Huaibei Shenneng Power Generation under Shenergy Co Ltd - new coal capacity, not legacy. Cumberland Unit 1 is the opposite vintage: 1,300 MW running since 1973 under the Tennessee Valley Authority. And Ontimavadi shows why the status column earns its keep - a 6,300 MW Indian proposal marked cancelled, its parent chain split three ways down to a Mauritius entity. One join key (unit-id), one enum for lifecycle state, coordinates on every row: the shape stays constant whether you pull ten units or all of them.

Seventeen verified core fields, written against the published schema rather than guessed. Identification comes first: unit-id and project-id are GEM's stable keys for the unit and the plant it belongs to, followed by the English station name, the unit name within it, and the local-language name. Physical attributes are capacity in gross (nameplate) megawatts and the nine-value status enum - announced, pre-permit, permitted, construction, operating, mothballed, shelved, cancelled, retired.

Corporate attribution is the part most copies of this data lose: owner carries the direct owner(s) with percentage in brackets, and parent the ultimate parent(s) the same way. Geography stacks four deep - country/area, subnational unit, continent-level region, and latitude/longitude - while start-year and end-year bracket the operating life.

The dictionary below is the verified core. Anything adjacent confirmed during sample preparation folds under additional fields on request rather than being promised blind.

Geography: global by design - 111 countries, every unit 30 MW and up, with continent-level regions from Asia (the bulk of both the operating fleet and the development queue) through Oceania. The threshold matters: nothing smaller than 30 MW clutters the file, so the rows are the fleet that actually moves fuel markets.

Temporal: a rolling census rather than a history table. The live file covers proposals since 2010 and retirements since 2000 alongside today's fleet, and releases land twice a year around January and July - the July 2026 edition is the reference for this page.

Granularity: one row per generating unit, rollable to plant, country or region because the identifiers survive the aggregation. That unit grain is what separates a tracker from a statistical yearbook - a 660 MW cancellation and a 25 MW retirement never blur together.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the channel your stack already speaks. The rows arrive identical either way - one record per unit with its identifiers, status, capacity, ownership chain and coordinates - extracted so nothing in your pipeline re-assembles a tracker by hand.

Every delivery ships with the field dictionary above plus the sample rows for validation, so your first join attempt happens against evidence, not hope.

• Market researchers and consultants size generation markets unit by unit and track which developers are still adding capacity; worked flows continue on our market sizing page.
• ESG and climate teams start financed-emissions work from unit-level CO2 estimates built on capacity, coal type and combustion technology; see esg & emissions analysis.
• Credit and risk analysts read the status enum as collateral state - operating versus mothballed versus shelved changes the answer; see credit risk screening.
• Data scientists and ML engineers get a typed, geocoded panel that joins cleanly on unit-id and maps without geocoding; see data scientists use cases.
• Journalists and academics cite unit-level provenage reviewed by regional specialists rather than press-release totals; see citation-grade research.

Market researchers and consultants get the structural layer - 14,674 units, 111 countries, 3,000+ owners - that turns a headline GW figure into a ranked customer or competitor list; the fuller workflow lives on market researchers in coal consumable fuels. Investors and quant researchers roll unit capacity up parent-company chains to price transition exposure where it actually sits; see investors and quants in coal consumable fuels. Journalists, academics and students get a footnoted evidence trail behind every plant; see journalists and academics in coal consumable fuels.