Global Power Emissions Database (GPED v2): CO2 emission characteristics from power plants during 1990-2015

Fossil fuel CO₂ emissions are the main anthropogenic cause of climate change. As the largest CO₂ emission emitter globally, electricity sector has attracted much attention from the scientists. Based on the methodology of the previous GPED database, the current GPED v2 dataset covers a longer time series (1990-2015) and provides information about capacity, generation, fuel type, age, location and annual CO₂ emission of more than 40,000 biomass- and fossil-fuel-burning power plants worldwide. The capacity of global operating fossil-fuel-burning power plants increased at an average annual growth rate of 2.7% during 1990-2000 and then climbed to 3.9% since 2000, driven primarily by population and economic growth. From the perspective of capacity, power plants fleet structure is dominated by coal-fired power plants (47%), followed by gas-fired (37%) and oil-fired (11%) power plants in 2015. We estimated that CO₂ emissions from global electricity production increased from 7.7Gt in 1990 to 13.5Gt in 2015, with 2.6%, 3.7%, -1.1% annual average rate for coal-fired, gas-fired and oil-fired power plants, respectively. Focusing on coal-fired power plants, newly-built units mainly came from developing country, especially for China (68%) and India (12%), and of all retired units, China, Europe and the US contributed 39%, 32% and 18% of total capacity, respectively. The share of CO₂ emission of large coal-fired units (≥600MW) increased from 17% in 1990 to 34% in 2015, whereas the share of small units (<100MW) dropped from 18% to 10%, reflecting the transition of global coal-fired fleet structure to a larger capacity scale.