Story · Europe map · about 4 min
Where Europe’s electricity is made
Every dot is a power plant of 1 MW or more, coloured by its main fuel and sized by its capacity, from a 2021 snapshot. This tour reads the picture country by country, then shows what it leaves out.
Almost eleven thousand plants
The database holds 10,889 plants inside this map’s window, one dot for each plant (a plant may have several generating units), sized by the most it could produce, which is more than it usually makes. Grey and black are oil and coal, pink is nuclear, light blue is hydro, orange is gas. The few biggest dots are worth finding first. Wind and solar plants are small and often missing from the national registers behind this database, so the map is better for comparing fuels within one country than for comparing countries.
France: more than half nuclear
France’s 19 nuclear plants add up to 63,130 MW, 57% of all the capacity the database lists for the country; hydro is 18%, wind 8%. Gravelines, on the Channel coast, is the largest in France at 5,460 MW, then Paluel at 5,320 MW and Cattenom at 5,200 MW. Across the whole window only Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine (6,000 MW) and Bełchatów in Poland (5,472 MW) are larger. The database also lists a Moscow heat and power plant at 5,690 MW, about four times what other trackers give, so that dot is drawn too big.
Coal, in Poland and Germany
Poland’s capacity is 82% coal, 30,959 MW, and its Bełchatów plant, 5,472 MW, is the biggest coal plant in the window. Germany lists 47,773 MW of coal, 43% of its capacity, and Niederaussem alone is 3,430 MW. These are the black dots, and many sit in the coalfields of Silesia, the Rhineland and Lusatia, which straddles the German and Polish border.
Norway, almost all water
Norway’s 306 plants add up to 32,551 MW, and 94% of that is hydro, 30,474 MW from 291 plants. Sweden splits between hydro and nuclear: 49% hydro and 37% nuclear, from just three nuclear plants. Norway’s hydro plants are many and modest, about 105 MW each on average.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Germany shows 5,059 MW of wind in this database and the United Kingdom 23,202 MW. What does that tell you about the country, and what about the database?
- A dot’s size is capacity, the most a plant could produce. Why does a 1,000 MW solar plant and a 1,000 MW nuclear plant not make the same amount of electricity in a year?
Try it on the map: Switch on the power plants layer and click Gravelines, then Bełchatów, then a hydro plant in Norway. What does the click panel tell you that the colour does not?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.