Guest post: Tracking G7 climate progress with data from 116,095 power plants
Expanding and decarbonising the world’s electricity supplies is key to meeting global climate goals – and this has been reflected in a series of recent pledges.
These include the COP28 deal to triple global renewable capacity by 2030 and agreement among the G7 group of major economies to end the use of unabated coal power by 2035.
These targets contribute towards the transition away from fossil fuels and aligning energy systems with the 1.5C limit, priorities that were also agreed at COP28.
However, the proliferation of power-sector targets creates a pressing need for timely data in order to keep tabs on progress.
The new Global Energy Monitor (GEM) global integrated power tracker (GIPT) makes it easy to track progress, bringing together the latest data on power-plant developments around the world.
This article introduces the GIPT and illustrates the sorts of insights it can generate, using the example of the G7’s pledges – and progress towards meeting them.
About the tracker
The GIPT is the culmination of a decade of work since GEM created its global coal plant tracker in 2014. It currently consists of a database of 116,095 power units and is free to use.
The GIPT is a Creative Commons database based on GEM trackers for coal, gas, oil, hydropower, utility-scale solar, wind, nuclear, bioenergy and geothermal, as well as on energy ownership.
GEM’s international team manually researches each power facility in the database using governmental, corporate and media reports, as well as satellite imagery. They work in Arabic, Chinese, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
The data is updated twice per year and is also mapped to allow geospatial analysis, with each of the underlying trackers providing various summaries and dashboard information.
Coal phaseout
The G7 pledge to phase out unabated coal power by 2035 is seen as particularly significant for the US and Japan, who host the largest coal fleets in the group.
Data in the GIPT shows that coal power capacity in G7 countries peaked at 497 gigawatts (GW) in 2010 and has since fallen 37%, to 310GW of operational capacity at the end of 2023.
A continuation in the rapid decline in operating coal capacity in the UK, France, Italy and Canada will see these countries hitting their targeted coal phaseout dates before 2030.
The parties that make up Germany’s government wrote into their coalition agreement in 2021 that the 2035-2038 deadline for coal exit should “ideally” be brought forward to 2030. However, the coalition’s commitment to this ambition is far from assured.
Japan and the US, meanwhile, still have no explicit coal phaseout target. New rules from the US Environmental Protection Agency, requiring coal plants to capture 90% of their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2032, are expected to expedite plant closures.
If firm national targets for coal-exit years are followed – and assuming a 45-year average lifetime for coal plants in Japan and the US that lack a planned retirement year – then the G7 coal fleet would not be completely phased out until the middle of this century, as shown in the figure below.
Under this current outlook for retirements there would be a 77% reduction in G7 coal plant capacity by 2035 compared to today, leaving 72GW remaining.
Yet numerous assessments suggest that developed countries – such as those in the G7 – should completely phase out unabated coal by 2030, if the world is to limit warming to 1.5C.
This goal of an end by 2030 to unabated coal power could be achieved under an accelerated phaseout of G7 coal plants, whereby the average plant lifetime drops by 10 years, as shown in the figure.
Hiding within this average, however, is a considerable number of early retirements, mostly impacting coal-reliant G7 countries, particularly the US and Japan.
GIPT data show that, under this accelerated coal retirement case, some 28% of currently operating coal capacity in Japan – 15GW – would retire before reaching 20 years of operation.
Gas proliferation
Turning to G7 gas power, the GIPT shows that capacity grew by 55% over the past two decades. Gas is now the G7’s largest source of electricity and its leading source of power sector CO2.
This is despite the lower emissions intensity – the CO2 emissions per unit of electricity – of gas compared to coal, as well as the growing contributions from renewables, notably wind and solar.
Moreover, recent analysis suggests that electricity generation in developed countries such as the G7 should be completely decarbonised by 2035 to align with the 1.5C limit. This would mean phasing out unabated gas power by 2035, after shutting down coal by 2030.
Yet an additional 73GW of new gas-fired projects are currently in development across the G7, the majority of which are in the US, as shown in the figure below.
(The GIPT classifies “in development” projects as those that have been announced or are in the pre-construction and construction phases.)
