There are a lot of them – 62,500 power plants operating today, in fact. That number includes everything from coal-fired power plants to wind farms to hydroelectric dams with a capacity of 30 megawatts or greater. The map comes from a recent GE report and really makes it easy to see where the various plants are located in a broad overview. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about how important various sources are. Let’s take Germany, which on the GE map is blanketed with solar installations. In reality Germany only gets 25% of its electricity from renewable resources and most from coal and natural gas (Nature has a nice interactive chart on energy use that shows who is consuming the most of various sources).
Now as far as the GE power plant map, all we need is to have it in Google Map form so we can zoom in to see where our electricity is produced.
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