WRI Global Power Plant Database

Use in your agent

Load WRI global power plants into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 1, 2026.

Access

• No account or key. Version 1.3.0 is a direct ZIP download.
• The archive includes one CSV plus documentation and release notes.

Request

curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) SignalLabCheck/1.0' -O 'https://datasets.wri.org/private-admin/dataset/53623dfd-3df6-4f15-a091-67457cdb571f/resource/66bcdacc-3d0e-46ad-9271-a5a76b1853d2/download/globalpowerplantdatabasev130.zip'

Format

ZIP with a CSV of plant names, country codes, coordinates, capacity MW, primary and secondary fuels, commissioning year, owner, source URLs, estimated and reported generation, and generation-data provenance.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""WRI Global Power Plant Database v1.3.0 ZIP -> pandas -> Parquet."""
import io
import zipfile
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://datasets.wri.org/private-admin/dataset/53623dfd-3df6-4f15-a091-67457cdb571f/resource/66bcdacc-3d0e-46ad-9271-a5a76b1853d2/download/globalpowerplantdatabasev130.zip"
HEADERS = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) SignalLabCheck/1.0"}
r = requests.get(URL, headers=HEADERS, timeout=120)
r.raise_for_status()
with zipfile.ZipFile(io.BytesIO(r.content)) as archive:
    member = next(name for name in archive.namelist() if name.lower().endswith(".csv"))
    df = pd.read_csv(archive.open(member), low_memory=False)
df.to_parquet("wri_global_power_plants.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "plants", df["country"].nunique(), "countries",
      round(df["capacity_mw"].sum(), 1), "MW")

Run by us on 2026-11-01 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 34936 plants 167 countries 5706975.4 MW

Limits

• Rate limit: Not stated.
• The current packaged release is version 1.3.0 from June 2021.
• Annual generation columns cover 2013 through 2017.

Quirks

• Reported and estimated generation columns are separate; retain the generation-data source fields when modeling.
• Primary fuel identifies the largest or designated source, while the ordering of other-fuel columns is not a priority ranking.
• Some annual generation values follow fiscal or regulatory years rather than calendar years, and the database does not distinguish them.

Terms and attribution

• The dataset carries a Creative Commons Attribution license and WRI identifies CC BY 4.0 as its standard data license.
• Use the dataset's supplied citation, link back to the work and indicate modifications.

Sources

• https://datasets.wri.org/datasets/global-power-plant-database: “Generation is provided at the year scale for the years 2013-2017.”
• https://www.wri.org/research/global-database-power-plants: “The Global Power Plant Database is a comprehensive, open source database of power plants around the world.”
• https://www.wri.org/data/open-data-commitment: “We have adopted the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License as our standard license for publications and data, and the MIT License as our standard license for source code.”