facility-phase record

Facility-phase record: one row of Global Energy Monitor's power trackers, keyed to the phase of a plant rather than the plant itself. Each phase carries its own capacity, status and identifiers - which is why headline counts read '103,940 solar farm phases' instead of farm counts.

In this catalog it shows up concretely:

• Global Solar Power Tracker — Facility/phase level for utility-scale solar; national aggregates for distributed solar; request-form delivery, quality score 9/10, free, 103,940 phases.
• Global Wind Power Tracker — Facility/phase level; request-form delivery, quality score 9/10, free, 32,227 phases across 166 countries/areas.

The seed rule comes from GEM's own structure: one facility can span multiple unit or construction phases, and the solar tracker's terms notes even refer to "a TZ ID in the Other IDs (unit/phase) column" for records sourced from TransitionZero.

Counting units decides whether your capacity numbers reconcile. Sum project names and you double-count phases built under separate permits; sum phases and you cannot match a press release about one farm.

Because both trackers are keyed at phase level - 103,940 solar farm phases and 32,227 wind phases - any "number of plants" claim needs to say which unit it counts before it can be compared with another source.

Status lives on the phase too, so an operating figure drawn from one phase of a partly built site will not equal the site's nameplate.

To verify a source really provides facility-phase records, work through:

1. Ask for the grain. Global Solar Power Tracker states "Facility/phase level for utility-scale solar" in its own coverage note - demand equivalent wording from any vendor.

1. Check for duplicate plants. If one named farm appears on several rows, rows are phases; if it never does, rows are plants.

1. Look for per-phase identifiers. GEM carries unit/phase identifiers such as the TZ ID in the Other IDs column; a file with no phase-level ID cannot be joined reliably.

1. Reconcile headline counts. 103,940 solar phases versus 32,227 wind phases across 166 countries/areas - if your vendor's totals are far below these for the same scope, they are counting projects, not phases.

1. Get update cadence in writing: only 22.6% of the 1,744 cataloged datasets update daily, so "always current" needs evidence.

• prospective capacity — Capacity in development - announced, permitted or under construction but not yet operating - published alongside operating totals in GEM's inventories.